“When I was an assistant at my first salon, right out of school, we had classes every Wednesday night. One week I couldn’t find a model in time, so my mentor had someone she knew that could come in and be my model. So the model comes in and seems perfectly normal. I start the consultation and start looking through her hair to see what I’d need to do. Apparently this young lady had not washed her hair in what I’m assuming was weeks, because her hair was so greasy that every time I touched her hair, my hand came back drenched. And the smell! It was the worst thing I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. I asked my mentor if I could shampoo her before starting and was told that I couldn’t. So here I am working on this girl, who almost literally has grease dripping from her hair. I must have washed my hands 10 times that night. Needless to say, I had my own model for every class after that one.
Another time when I first started at the school, one of the instructors was polishing up a haircut on a young man. She was thinning out the sides of his hair. I’m not sure if you know what thinning shears look like, but they have teeth on them. So she’s thinning out his hair and cuts his ear wide open with those puppies. She almost immediately starts crying and freaking out. I go over tell him the cut will be free of charge, and he leaves not upset or anything. Fast-forward a year and he comes back in. The student cutting his hair is again thinning his hair out. Well, she just so happens to do the exact same thing, on the same ear. Another free haircut and I never saw him again. He never came back.
We also had this student who had a hard time understanding how to do things. Not a big deal, we usually just keep an extra eye on those students to make sure nothing goes wrong. Well, the one time no one could watch her, she was thinning out a client’s hair. For some reason she decided to cut the hair a few inches from the scalp, which you should never do on long hair. She suddenly sneezed as she was thinning the client’s hair. Since she had the thinning shears so close to the woman’s scalp, the client jolted back and got a nice 3-inch long cut right on her scalp, that I’m sure needed stitches. She’s looking like she’s about to faint and the student is freaking out. I’m there, holding a towel to this poor girl’s head for 20 minutes while we call her parents and have them come take her to the hospital. She never came back either. Still to this day, I have no idea what possessed that student to start thinning the hair so close to the scalp.”