11. ROLLERS

About 3 months ago I went to a very upscale salon in my area that came highly recommended. As I've mentioned before, I go through hairdressers like I go through nursing jobs, so before I let anyone touch my hair, I make an appointment for a consultation with a stylist. One stylist in particular was recommended as being "phenomenal" with color.

I met with George, a man about 27, very soft spoken, kind of artsy-nerdy, but who seemed very confident in understanding what I was looking for. I brought lots of photos and even photos of how my hair was a few years back and told him that I just wanted my hair back to the way I used to have it, my base color and lots of highlights. He assured me that he knew exactly what I wanted, and I made an appointment with him for the following week.

Long story short, my hair came out nothing as we discussed. I had specifically told him that I did not like chunky highlights, rather to spread them out in thin strips about 1/8" wide. What I got was 1" chunks of very blond hair on top of auburn hair (my base color is a dark brown). I knew when he saw it he knew it was wrong and was quick to say that sometimes a small touch up here and there is needed to get it perfect, so I should come back tomorrow and he would rectify the situation. I neglected to say that throughout this 3 1/2 hour ordeal, small things were mentioned in passing such as "your porosity is off, so I'm just going to add this to your shampoo," and "your ends are a bit dry so I'll add this conditioner to them," never stating that this was being tacked on as an additional service to my bill, which came to a whopping $250.00. Plus he tried selling me product at $26 per bottle. To shorten this pathetic disaster, I ended up going back to him 3 times to fix this mess. Each time I heard that sometimes another touch up is needed, but after 3 strikes you're out and I was done. And pissed.

I tell you this because on the first day of school when we were receiving our orientation from Ms. Pauly, she mentioned that a stylist from a local upscale salon comes in periodically to teach the newest methods in haircutting, and mentioned the name of the salon. Do you know how sometimes you know instantly what's going to happen next? Well last night I walked into the school, and guess who's teaching the haircutting class. You guessed it.

I avoided him like the plague, as I have since found another hairdresser who so far has been doing what I ask (this is another story for another time) and I didn't want to embarass him as well as myself, since my hair is drastically different than the mess he had left it in. Everytime I had to walk by the open classroon that he was teaching in, I raised my mannequin head to the side of my head so it was it's profile that was seen instead of mine. I know, real mature. But sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

Mr. Sanchez obviously has a new girlfriend, as he spent a good portion of the evening with his cell phone hooked to his pants while he continuously checked for texts. Instead of 2 10 minute breaks we were given one 15 minute and one for 30 minutes. One of the girls in the class and I stayed in the classroom to use this time to catch up on some homework, while the others disappeared. I really didn't appreciate his use of our time for his personal use.

We spent most of the evening going over our reading assignment, (while he checked for text messages), and then in the last hour we learned how to apply rollers to the hair.

When I was a kid, the only people I ever saw in rollers were the women in the beauty parlor that my mother dragged me to every Saturday to sit, watch and wait for what seemed a tortuous amount of time, while she and her fellow roller queens sat under the hair dryers and tried to hear each other speak. I never new that there actually was an art form to their application.

It seems that the placement on the scalp is very important. They are not arbitrarily placed, but strategically, according to what kind of curl you want and how much volume (lift) you want the curl to have. I never understood why, in my futile attempts to try and set my mother's hair on my own, the hair would fall off the roller from the sides, only to learn that there is also a method to how wide the hair should be as well as how much hair gets rolled on depending on what kind of result you are trying to achieve. It really was very interesting. Too bad we only got to do 1/2 a head and then it was time to clean up to get ready to go home. All of us were dying to finish and dry our mannequin's hair to see the finished result but time had run out. We were all disappointed.

I cannot believe that this is already the third week of school. We will get a print-out of how many hours we've accumulated so far, so that I can officially start my count down.