This hairdresser, yes, the one I’d been seeing for just over a year. The one who convinced me to let my hair grow back to its natural colour. The one with a salon in her basement, a few minutes’ walk from my place.
A young woman, not unkind, but rigid as a broom handle. She managed hair the way you manage a sixth-grade class two weeks before summer break. With me, she had gradually become an unsolicited hair tutor, complete with syllabus.
Bleaching short hair? “It’s not good for your hair.” Sure, but short hair has time to recover from a deep bleach trauma, it seems to me. It does its therapy, grows back in the right direction, without ingrown ends or complaints.
Then there was the three-week rule. Immovable. No exceptions, no context. If you bleach, you must bleach again at three weeks, or the horror descends: the yellow band. The announced catastrophe. The imminent aesthetic disaster. Social shame, probably. And let’s not forget the treatments : hydrating shampoo, revitalizing mask. What I saw, mostly, were the costs adding up, stacking, accumulating. Every three weeks: steady income for her. For me? Another hole in an already thin budget. At that price, the yellow band can live its quiet little life. It’s self-sufficient, and it always ends up under the scissors anyway.
Especially since, not a small detail, I did this for years with another hairdresser, before I moved. Every six or seven weeks. No problem. And besides, I like the grow-out: a little ombre, alive, honest. Prettier to my eye than that smooth, uniform block that looks like a Snapchat filter applied directly to the skull.
But no. It had to be done “properly.” Meaning: the way she had decided, in her head, for an abstract client who was not me. At a certain point, it’s no longer advice. It’s control, with a blowout and a professional smile on top.
So I fired her.
I don’t book with the hair-orthodoxy ayatollahs.
I’m going back to my old hairdresser. I tried the “all natural” prescribed by the new one for a year. It’s not ugly. But I don’t like my head. And I think it matters — not wanting to shave everything off every time you catch yourself in a mirror.
