Life At The Hair Salon

I have been writing about a lot of things from the past, so I thought that I would bring you up to date at the current location.  One of our designers is retiring.  There are several reasons why including her arthiritis in her hands, her husband has wanted her to retire for four years, she is tired, etc.  We will miss her a lot.

There are a few problems because of this.

Number one is that there is no one to do her customers.  One of our designers is an instructor at a beauty school and only works nights, another is going for her instructor’s license, and so, only works at night.  The owner is doing all of the clients that she wants now, but has volunteered to do a few.   I only work 3 days a week and am usually booked pretty solid.

This brings us to number 2.   Her clients would rather not pay my prices, and apparently, some of them have gone into sticker shock when asking prices at other salons.  We have tried to locate hairstylists for them without many results.

The reason for this is number 3.  It seems that there are very few hairstylists who know how to tease hair properly, or who want to do little ladies that need hairstyles that will last all week because they cannot hold up their arms for long enough to do it themselves.  Why is this?

All of you stylist out there!  Expand your horizons!  If you have been reading my blog for long, you know that I specialize in African-American hair.  Yes, I also do White, Hispanic, and any other hair that wants to sit in my chair, and I can tease with the best of them.  (I can, but I do not, however, like doing men’s clipper cuts.) My point is this.  Challenge yourself.  Learn something new, even if it is an old technique, as long as it is new to you.  Pick up your teasing combs and practice!  Lift those clients up out of the chair, and buy some hairspray that will withstand a windstorm!  You are missing out on a lot of clientele and a lot of interesting people with life stories to tell.  For some of them, the salon is their social life.   Regular clients are your bread and butter, and who makes better regular clients than your weekly shampoo and set crowd.  Most clients that blow dry their hair will only be in the salon every five or six weeks for a cut or possibly a color or hilite.  A weekly shampoo and set customer will be in every week and will also need perms and color.  These are clients with whom you build relationships.  In this profession, you really have to love what you do, and you have to love people.  It doesn’t really matter whose name is on your paycheck, ultimately, your clients write it.  Expand your avenues of revenue by expanding your talents.

OK, sorry that I haven’t been on for awhile.  I honestly did not realize it had been so long.  My clients and my husband have been fussing!  Imagine that!  I have always said that I have too much of my space out here to have any of “myspace” in the computer.  I tend to write my blogs in my head on the way home from work, but I just don’t seem to have a port to automatically download them into the computer.  Maybe I should have been a Borg.

Something happened to one of my customers that really was not funny, but to hear her tell it, well, we were laughing so hard, I had to put down my Marcel curling iron.

She and her boyfriend had gone fishing at the lake.  They both love to fish.  He was sitting up on a wall fishing, and she was standing on a big rock close to the edge.  Every once in a while, she would leave the rock to get more bait.  They had been there most of the day.  Well, apparently, she went for bait, and stepped back onto the rock, which chose that precise moment to move.  It pitched her forward, upside down, into the lake!  Her boyfriend looked over and didn’t see her, so he jumped off the wall and came running.  She was nowhere to be seen.  He ran out into the water, and all he could see of her was the heel of one shoe sticking up under the water.  He dove in and grabbed the heel and drug her out.  She said the water was cold, and it was about 25 feet deep.  She had thought that she would go to the bottom and push her way back up, but she couldn’t find the bottom! She was scared!  She just kept going down and down!

I can hear her voice telling the story.  She made it sound so funny!!  I just had to ask her if she recovered her fishing pole.  She said yes she did, but she lost her brand new glasses.  She was freezing.  They both had to drive home wet.  He was so upset that he wouldn’t even talk about it to her daughter, but the worst thing, she said, was that just the night before, she had gotten her hair done!