"Well, aren't you the most exciting thing I've seen all week, no all month?"
Complimentary, yes. The first thing you'd like to hear coming out of your hair dresser's mouth? Not so much.
I had been wanting to cut my hair short for quite some time. The prospect of spending four months in Japan stayed my hand (or rather my scissors) since none of my imaginings of how that salon experience would go with my Japanese language skills ended well. So, aflush with the excitement of being able to talk to every street vendor in town (except my new phone voice message system that inexplicably came up in French, but that's another story), I headed to the nearest hair dressers and made an appointment for this weekend.
When you desire a fairly drastic cut, it is always a good idea to give your hair stylist a picture, rather than a few random arm waves. Digging through old photos, I found one of myself from a number of years back with the cut I wished to revert to. The picture was a clear, face-on shot but I couldn't find an accompanying image of the back of my head. Hunting through magazines in the local supermarket only offered me Angelina Jolie (hair too long) or Brad Pitt (facial hair too long) and I was on the brink of giving up (generally; such magazines have that effect), when I glanced down at my key chain. Attached to the bunch of shiny new keys I'd accumulated in the last week, was a small model of one of my favourite Japanese anime characters (Eiji from Tenipuri) and a picture of another (Atobe, from the same series). Both were sporting basically the same hair-do I required. Well ... it was a bit unconventional, but hey if it works ... So along with the photo, I presented both Atobe and Eiji for inspection and preyed to the heavens above that the stylist wasn't a secret Japanese manga fan.
At that point, said stylist started to have far too much fun. We went through a whole range of different styles simply because she wanted to "try things out" as we went down in length. It was during this that the topmost comment made an appearance and I hoped she would remember to stop before we got too carried away.
Fortunately, she did. I now have a funky short hair do .... just in time for the winter. But hey, it's easier to cram under a woolly hat.
Complimentary, yes. The first thing you'd like to hear coming out of your hair dresser's mouth? Not so much.
I had been wanting to cut my hair short for quite some time. The prospect of spending four months in Japan stayed my hand (or rather my scissors) since none of my imaginings of how that salon experience would go with my Japanese language skills ended well. So, aflush with the excitement of being able to talk to every street vendor in town (except my new phone voice message system that inexplicably came up in French, but that's another story), I headed to the nearest hair dressers and made an appointment for this weekend.
When you desire a fairly drastic cut, it is always a good idea to give your hair stylist a picture, rather than a few random arm waves. Digging through old photos, I found one of myself from a number of years back with the cut I wished to revert to. The picture was a clear, face-on shot but I couldn't find an accompanying image of the back of my head. Hunting through magazines in the local supermarket only offered me Angelina Jolie (hair too long) or Brad Pitt (facial hair too long) and I was on the brink of giving up (generally; such magazines have that effect), when I glanced down at my key chain. Attached to the bunch of shiny new keys I'd accumulated in the last week, was a small model of one of my favourite Japanese anime characters (Eiji from Tenipuri) and a picture of another (Atobe, from the same series). Both were sporting basically the same hair-do I required. Well ... it was a bit unconventional, but hey if it works ... So along with the photo, I presented both Atobe and Eiji for inspection and preyed to the heavens above that the stylist wasn't a secret Japanese manga fan.
At that point, said stylist started to have far too much fun. We went through a whole range of different styles simply because she wanted to "try things out" as we went down in length. It was during this that the topmost comment made an appearance and I hoped she would remember to stop before we got too carried away.
Fortunately, she did. I now have a funky short hair do .... just in time for the winter. But hey, it's easier to cram under a woolly hat.