Only Your Hairdresser Knows For Sure

One of the best things about being a hairdresser is that I get to talk to interesting and funny people all day long. My clients tell me everything--and I do mean everything--that’s going on in their lives. I know who’s pregnant, who just got a new job, who’s having an affair, and who just wishes they were. We talk about home renovations, trips to the beach, and the kids’ soccer games. I’m often even privy to some very personal details that they share with no one else. Sometimes I tell my clients that I’m taking notes on all that they say and will some day write a scandalous tell-all book and then retire in massive disgrace. But they know I’m only kidding, my grave will be crowded with the many secrets I’m taking with me. I’m not really sure why they tell me all of this information, but entrust me with it they do. I suppose its because they know that I can keep a secret and that I’ll listen without judgment.

The only thing a client is ever afraid to confess to me is when they’ve been attempting to cut or color their own hair. Now I’ll admit that I’m very possessive of my work and that I don’t like when they monkey around with it, and my clients know that. But some people assume I am going to throw a full on hissy-fit as if some grievous affront has been perpetrated onto my artistic sensibilities. Some act so contrite that I believe they must think I’m going to shame them in front of the whole salon and then beat them with reeds about the head and neck. Of course, I am not that high strung and I am certainly not that reactive. I know that people are bound to take their hair into their own hands from time to time, for better or worse, and I will always be there to correct their mistakes when necessary. The most common reasons people give for self-hair-abuse is trying to save time or money, or perhaps they couldn’t get into their stylist that day and thought that their hair issue was too pressing to wait. There are a hundred reasons why clients do it, and they almost always regret it after the deed is done.

Doing your own hair color at home is risky. There are a lot of factors to consider to get a satisfactory result. Are you using a color that is going to damage your hair? Which shade or formulation should you chose? Do you know the proper way to apply color? What happens if it interacts badly with whatever chemical processes you’ve previously had done? In the salon you’re in the caring hands of a professional who has a whole arsenal of knowledge and products to get the job done right. At home you have nothing but white-knuckle panic and Cheer laundry detergent if things go wrong, and believe me neither will help. I bring up the detergent because it reminds me of a frantic call I received from a client a couple of years ago. Her seventeen year old son, on the day of his junior prom, had decided that he would look more debonair in his tuxedo if he had darker hair. Without telling his mom, or apparently consulting anyone with good taste or sense, he bought some black hair color at the drug store and applied it covertly in his bathroom. Well, I think you can see where this story is going…and its not good. After he rinsed out the color and saw his hair, of course, he was horrified. He tried washing it six or seven times, but it was still a deep, opaque, blue-black. Billy, the pride of the baseball team, now looked like he was ready to hang out in the cemetery with the moody Goth kids. And I must say, he bore a striking resemblance to a young Johnny Cash, before the alcohol and death got him. In his panic, Billy even tried washing it a couple more times with laundry detergent before he finally showed it to his mom. That’s of course where I come into the story. After talking with his mom I told her to bring him in straight away, we had no time to waste, the prom was in a few hours. (I did, of course, take the time to make Billy sing a verse of “Walk the Line” just for funnsies). I stripped the color from his hair, re-colored it to match his natural color and he was able to make the prom on time. As he left, I told him to have a good time and to say hi to June Carter Cash for me.

As bad as home hair coloring can be, it’s usually something I can correct in one salon visit. The thing that can take several visits or more to fix is the home haircut. This is actually where most at-home hair disasters occur. If I’ve seen one Dora the Explorer bang, I’ve seen a hundred. You have to be very skilled to be able to cut your own hair. Even hairdressers who know what they’re doing usually get a co-worker to cut their hair. If they aren’t willing to risk it, why would you? The typical error occurs when the client just makes a horizontal, right to left cut across their bangs or the sides of their hair. This almost always leaves the hair a frightful mess. The reason is that you can’t cut hair straight across like you would a sheet of paper. If you’ve noticed, we stylists pull a section of hair in one direction and snip, then pull it further over in the next direction and snip, and continue across the head in even sections. We do this because your head is round, not flat. The irony of this is that a round cut will look straight while a straight cut will look uneven. Also, your hair grows at different angles all over your head and we assess these patterns as we go along and cut accordingly. The only way you could see your whole head is with an elaborate array of multiple mirrors. So unless the county fair is in town and you happen to be in the funhouse with a pair of scissors--which by the way is frowned upon by carnival security-- this is not advisable. Nine times out of ten an at-home haircut is going to look like an at-home haircut, which brings me to another story, and this happens a lot!

There seems to be a crazy new trend in which grown women with jobs, husbands, children and responsibilities, get together with other women who have jobs, husbands, children and responsibilities and they drink a lot of wine, play bunko and end the night giving each other drunken makeovers. Sometimes this can be as tame as painting a girlfriends toenails with their daughter’s purple glitter polish. Other times it can be a little more serious, like trying out experimental depilatory creams. But occasionally things go really bad and the night results in no one getting to leave until somebody has had a home perm. The next thing you know, there is someone’s boss, employee, wife, and mother that now looks like Mrs. Roper from Three’s Company. And the next day there is a stylist, sometimes me, who is dealing with the fallout and trying to do damage control, literally and figuratively. They always say it will never happen again, but I always cringe a little inside when I hear about the next bunko party.

But women are not the only ones who have been known to wreak havoc on their hair. I’ve had more than one male client come to their appointment sheepishly smiling and showing off their self-styled Dumb and Dumber bang. Or, my personal favorite, the sideburn suicide. You know what I am talking about. Men will over-trim their sideburns until they have disappeared altogether. My professional advice to my male clients is if you are trimming your sideburns and they still are not even after the second attempt, stop and get to your stylist to do it for you. No one wants to see a man clean shaven up to his temples. It just looks weird and icky. Another problem men encounter, is the ever-difficult trimming of the neck hair. Inevitably some men will over shoot and wipe out part of their nape line. Only time can fix that.

So what have we learned here? You should feel comfortable enough with your stylist to tell them anything. Freely confess all of your sins, hair and otherwise. But most of all, remember the stylist’s chair is like a sacred confessional where you can come to seek absolution, even for the stupid stuff...like trying something at home.

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