Hair disasters

A few weeks ago, I posted about my own hair disasters. And now, I feel much better because I'm not alone! The very funny Laura Bowers (whose first book, Beauty Shop, comes out in May) has a Beauty Shop Galley Giveaway! going on right now. All you have to do is tell your most embarassing beauty shop horror story and you could win. What? You don't have a horror story? Well then, you don't deserve to win. Okay, fine, you can still win, because it's not my contest, it's Laura's contest and because she's an empathetic person, she also has other categories you can enter, like your favourite home salon memory, stories of hairstyles your parents forced you to have, or, if you don't want to write anything at all, you can just send a picture of your worst hairstyle. Which might be worse than actually discussing your beauty shop horror story. It certainly takes more guts. I'd like to say that I would enter this category except that all my childhood pictures are on the bookshelf of the home I grew up in, but I think it's that I've had so many bad haircuts, it would be hard to narrow it down to one.

There's the one from the fourth grade, when I thought it would be cool to grow a rat's tail. Seriously.

And now, because I just remembered it, I'll share with you yet another hair disaster.

In first-year university, when I'd just moved to Toronto, I didn't have a hairstylist. Now, I could've asked my sister, who lived in the city, for a recommendation, but I didn't. Instead, I decided to take the advice of one of the student paper's writers who had written an article about how much money you can save
by going to a beauty school for a haircut. "These students are well on their way to being some of the top stylists in the city. And they need healthy heads of hair to practice on," the article said. Or SOMETHING LIKE THAT. Anyway, I decided to give it a shot. I was going through a brown hair with "natural" blond highlights phase, and the highlights were starting to grow out. All I needed was a touchup on the highlighted strands. Easy peasy. Plus, they were only going to charge me a fraction of the price I would've had to pay at a real salon, which tends to charge the same price for a root touchup as it does for highlights. Which is a lot when you're a student. (Note: if I'd really wanted to save money, I should've just let my hair go natural instead of constantly highlighting it, but I was obsessed with colouring my hair. It was the mousy brown curse. Back to the story...) So I went to the beauty school for my appointment. There were a lot of girls getting their hair done, young, old, kids, grandmothers, and I felt confident it would all work out. I explained to the student that I just needed the roots touched up on the highlighted strands.

Just the roots? She asked.

Just the roots on the highlighted parts, I told her.

There seemed to be some hesitation and some confusion, and I should've told her immediately to find her instructor so she could check that she knew what she was doing. Better yet, I should've gotten OUT of the chair before she started. Instead, I sat back, flipped open my InStyle and let her go to work.

She did a lot more work than she needed to. Instead of applying the bleach to the roots of the highlighted strands, she applied the bleach to all my roots. Every single strand of hair attached to my scalp.

When I noticed what she'd done, I became hysterical. I was screaming and crying all at once. The girl just stared at me, alarmed. I was freaking out. Her instructor rushed over, but what could she really do? So you know what she did? She said, "That's sort of complicated, they're not used to do anything like that."

Well then THEY shouldn't do things they don't know what to do. The instructor offered to fix it, but once you've bleached hair, how can you fix it? And I couldn't let them touch my hair any longer, so I made them rinse out the bleach, and then I walked out of there, brown hair with blond highlights and white roots, and walked all the way home because I was too embarassed to even get on the subway.