A First

Completely plagiarising my friend and business partner Karen, I'm going to write about a 'first' for me. See her blog 'So What's New?'

Yesterday I was a hair model - the good kind. I didn't have some shear wielding student attack my hair like a possessed lawnmower, I had my regular stylist, who I heart by the way, use me for a presentation. A few of the stylists from my salon, Grasshopper, had travelled to the Toni & Guy Academy in New York to learn new styles, techniques, and theory (yes, there are theories in haircutting) meaning that us three lucky gals, two haircut models and one color model got their hair did for free!

So why, out of all her clients, did my stylist ask me to model? Simple - I pretty much let her do whatever she wants to my hair and I'm not one of those people who freaks out if it's not exactly what I envisioned. Don't get me wrong, I once was that girl, when I was 15 and the local village hairdresser decided that to take some of the volume out of my wavy, fine, frizzy hair she would simply chop it all off to about 2 inches long around my head a la Mrs. Doubtfire. That time I did freak out and walked home with my arms wrapped around my head, crying like a banshee. That was my first and worst foray into so called professional hairstyling and since then I've never had a bad experience, but like I said, unless they literally made all of my hair fall out of my head, I wouldn't freak. It's just hair, it'll grow back.

The weird thing about being a hair model was that rather than sitting in front of a mirror and reading a magazine, we were seated facing about twelve other stylists from the salon with nothing to read. I concentrated on a lot of shoes, wall decorations and anything else that would prevent me from making eye contact with the same person over and over - you know how that happens.

You also get to hear hair stylist speak. They talk to each other using the industry lingo rather than speaking in layman's terms for the clients. I had no idea what they were talking about, it could have been a discussion on the advancements in neuroscience for all that I understood. Words like halo, disconnection, diagonals, inverted radials etc. etc.

The whole experience was pretty great. A completely free, hot off the press haircut from a stylist I trust - she really sounded like she knew what she was talking about - who was giving me the level of attention that naturally comes when someone is being watched by their boss and colleagues.