Thank God my hair grows fast, is all I can say…

In preparation of washing out years of dying my hair, I decided to bite the bullet (the fear of getting your hair cut in a foreign country where all nuances of communication are lost) and get my hair cut.  This is the haircut I printed out and took with me to the salon:

This is a graduated bob in the back with a basic layer cut with scissor bites in the facial framing in the front, blended and connected.

This is also the third time I’ve tried to get this haircut – each time a disaster, each time it taking me a year or more + to grow it out to try again.  For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this seems to be the litmus test of a skilled hairdresser and why they all fail the test!  Just like most things I’ve gotten myself involved in, one reason I went to beauty school was simply because I wanted to fix such situations and thinking, “gee, I bet I can do that.”

And so I brought in the picture again (long since lost the credits for who the great hair designer was for this cut) carefully explaining what I want and making the special request to please PLEASE reserve some length so some select pieces can be pulled out and cut long and asking the hair stylist to please be an artist with the fringe.

This kind of thing strikes panic in hair stylists who are not confident with anything but their prescribed set of standard cuts.  This kind of thing is also what every hair stylist worth their salt dreams will walk in the door, bored into a stupor by the constant in-flow of mind-numbing sameness they must deliver.  I mean, am I asking too much?  It’s not as if it’s anything avant-guarde or anything…

And so I chose the same salon I went to before, because despite the mind-numbing same same style I chose before, I recognized I was in skilled hands. This particular salon’s stylists are trained in Toni & Guy methods and Vidal Sassoon methods, which is the perfect combination for this cut.  Toni & Guy methods are usually fast cut-over-finger cuts with theory behind them and tend towards edgy and trendy.  Sassoon cuts, however, are precision cuts which have elevated working with each head’s contours to new levels.  I went to this place knowing the back would benefit from Sassoon training and the front would benefit from Toni & Guy training.

Only my girl was gone and I got someone not listed on their website.  An incredibly handsome young Korean man who should have been a model instead of a hair stylist.  And he didn’t have Sassoon training, only Toni & Guy training.  And I was already in the chair and in the position of being a jerk if I rejected him.  And of course he couldn’t figure out what I wanted but dove in anyway.  I should have pulled the brake the second he went to his poorly made collection of basic cuts and showed me images that weren’t analogous at all.  I mean, I brought in THE photo, what part of I want THAT cut, didn’t he get?  He put in a huge effort on the wrong cut.  Fortunately there was still length enough in the front to save it, so I told him I wasn’t convinced it was the same cut and after some discussion, he dove in again.

I stopped him and asked, “Are you sure you know what I’m talking about?  Do you have a plan?”  And he said it was all good and it ended up being your garden variety bob, only too long because he didn’t have the brains to get out a comb and do a cut-over-comb for the back where it should be short, only it wasn’t even good garden variety bob because the front was a half-assed attempt to be like the photo, and instead of a blended area I had a Dorothy Hamill shelf..

As I frowned and tried not to scream, he knew it stunk and started trying to “fix” it.  He started trying to blend and connect because too much hair was ending where it should never end, in that region where the head is widest. The more he tried to fix it, the shorter the hair became on the top so that the shape became more and more like a helmet, until I had to say, “Stop!  Just please stop cutting.”

When I got home I was even more horrified to see one side was longer and lop-sided around the eyes/cheeks.  Fortunately, I brought my hair cutting scissors with me and have fixed it.  Also fortunately my hair grows super fast.  Usually I curse how fast my hair grows.  Now I pray for it to grow faster every night before I go to bed.  Aigo…