Finding a good stylist to cut your hair is almost impossible. Especially when you are female with short hair. And you are picky about details. There are a lot of people that can cut hair well enough, but there are only a few people who can handle the fine art of hair sculpture. The essential problem in getting a good hair cut is communicating a blurry vision of yourself to someone else. There is no guarantee that when you say I want this part shorter than this part, that the other person will have the same image as you do attached to the words that you are saying. What exactly is short? One inch? An inch and a half? Somewhere in between?
You may not even know yourself what image exactly you attach to a word – or yourself. It is exceedingly difficult to conjure up a mental image of what you want to look like after your hair has been cut. A concrete, physical image of self is perpetually out of my grasp. Mirrors and photographs always run the risk of surprising me. The words other people use to describe me consistently leave me going “What the fuck?” So, how I am supposed to take this dynamic self-image and turn it into something concrete for a stylist to understand? No wonder I am forever waiting for that perfect haircut, my knuckles whiting as I clutch the arms of the barber chair.
The anxiety surrounding the end result of a hair cut isn’t the only thing that can render the experience objectionable. What if you get stuck with a stylist whose breath is so nasty it leads you to wonder if she or he might be Satan herself or himself? That’s at least twenty minutes of trying to breath through you mouth without inhaling any stray hairs. Or what if she or he is one of those people that gets really close to you or has really big breasts that keep getting shoved up against your cheeks as she (or possibly he) reaches for the top of your head? The physical intimacy potentially rivals that of a one-night stand. Or what if when they are smearing all kinds of styling products in your hair they carelessly get the skin of your cheeks and forehead all sticky with pore-clogging goo? I hate the hair cut by-product break-out. Or what if they spray a bunch of water in your ear when the wash your hair? You could end up deaf for the next to hours. Or what if they get a little to frisky with their scissors? I have actually left a salon with a bleeding ear. When you really stop to think about it, a trip to the stylist can be almost as horrific as a trip to the dentist. So, my hair cut... I’ve had better, but at least I didn’t start sobbing once I left the salon.