Wednesday, April 19, 2006

More fodder for the "random haircut" googlers

Remember this?

Well I had the hair appointment yesterday. And it was (almost, kinda) fun!

From this extensive experience of top-end salons [insert ironic tone of voice here] I am now in a position to draw wild generalisations and list the differences between these and the mid/low-end of the range one I usually go to. Namely that the expensive stylists:

  • Treat you as though you might actually know what you want done with your own hair.
  • Don't go out of their way to reinforce your feelings of "only" being the customer.
  • Smile. Regularly.
  • Make small talk that isn't about you, so doesn't make you all self-conscious. E.g. instead of "so what did you get up to over Easter?" or "When do you finish your degree?" they ask, "Did you see the article about X in this morning's paper?" or "Isn't the warm weather today wonderful?" Much more relaxing.
  • Give the best head-massages.
  • Serve you an entire plunger of coffee instead of a mug of instant.
  • Have hair that you might actually want to emulate, rather than frizzy, dry, overdyed platinum blonde stuff which cries out to be left alone for a few months.
  • Probably don't overuse italics.
And my hair looks good too.

The voucher lets me have one more haircut there within the next six months for the same price, but then after that it would go back to their standard price of around $300 for what I had done yesterday. And no matter how much more pleasant the experience was than it is at my usual place, that is just not an amount of money I would ever pay for a haircut. So I get one more visit, and then it's back to scary random haircut woman.

Speaking of which, why are you all googling "random haircuts"? This has been turning up in my referral stats again (like, several times a day). What are you people hoping to find?

2 Comments:

Unknown said...

Yowza, $300??

It sounds kind of like you need a new hair salon. Do any of the people there charge less? Some of the nice salons near me have trainees who charge far less.

StyleyGeek said...

Yeah, I've been looking for a hair salon with trainees, but so far haven't found one that admits to it and charges less if the trainees do the cut.

That said, random haircut woman is pretty much the best of both worlds. She does a cut for $35 and foils for $50. So I'll probably go back to her even though the experience isn't exactly joyful.

$300 is really the top of the market (I think), and most places charge around $120 for the foils and $50 for a cut.

There are lots of cut-price places that do haircuts for $20, but they don't usually do colour at all, and also, although I used to go to them all the time, I then fell in love with the difference a really good cut makes.