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I told them, “You can’t be serious?”
The Daily Mail approached us to feature our ‘In the Chair’ makeovers. Their working title was – ‘Can a Haircut Really Make a Difference to your Hair?’
Duh! They may as well have said - Can clothes make a difference to how you look? Or - Can heels make a difference to your height?
But then I stopped and thought. Any journalist under 40 won’t remember the range and skills of haircutting from the 1950s through to the 1990s. And the countless makeover television programmes that started in the early days of Breakfast TV in the 1980s.
Come the 1990s, and the launch of effective flat irons and hair extensions – hairdressers stopped learning how to cut hair. Short fashion styles virtually disappeared. Long hair dominated. Just a basic ten-minute outline cut followed by heated tong-styling became de rigueur.
Yes, I’m biased, but I have to emphatically say that a great haircut is transformational. Trouble is there aren’t many great hairdressers anymore. Not for real people anyway.
And no amount of Botox, bee venom, or body fat injected into the face will make up for bad hair. Just as clothing and make-up won’t either. I wonder if the 20-year rise of pumping things in or sticking things on, mirrored the decline in haircutting skills?
A great haircut carves a guiding outline all around your face, rebalancing proportions, directing the eye of the viewer to the positive, and the most enhancing features. Hair is a conduit for your life energy expressed through your aura into the outside world. It’s a piece of living, moving art. And it matters a lot.
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In the Chair-Real People, Real Hair
Where were you standing when you decided to adjust your hair colour? Do you stand there often?
At the first salon I worked as a junior, back in the last century, the colourists at the salon had an interesting technique for showing clients their finished results; escorting them to the ladies toilet where a single electric wall light seemed to cast a favourable glow.