You can apply it wet or dry. We like to use it dry to polish ends and curls sealing the points. In Curly hair, our fave is the STYLE/JELLY Combo, mixed in hand. You just have to get the ratio right. For fine hair, try a 25% STYLE 75% JELLY combo, and you can adjust from there. You can always layer JELLY on its own over it for more definition. And you can use a lot of JELLY, we know stylists who use 20-30 pumps in one style believe it or not.
STYLE is considered an occulisive. It coats the outerlayers of the hair protecting it. We use Botinaical oils,butters and wax: Pumpkin, Shea, Avocado, Beeswax and Sunflower. Other non clean lines do the same thing but with silicones. I know there is a large no oil community with curly girls. I think it came from putting 100% oils like coconut on the hair which is ok every once and a while but too much all the time. It's important to understand our oils and butter are can rinse off with washings. It's some nerd science but we use an emuslifier in STYLE that bonds the oils with water together so they can be rinsed out. It's the same idea when you wash a pan with grease in it. You use soap, it does the same thing as our emuslifier and bonds water to oil. BTW we don't use soap, our is made from fatty acids!. Then you wash it down the drain. Otherwise you would have a clogged sink in no time. So when curly girls see oils, butters and wax they think build up but it really is how it's formulated that makes the difference. Hope this helps.