Before and After: Hair

Lissie (the black dog) and Looe (the yellow dog with a ribbon) Before...

After...

Before...

After...

OK, so maybe those pictures of me are confusing but basically what I am getting at is the dramatic haircut.  Kind of messed up yet again.  It's really short.  Like what Lissie went through last summer...

To back up a bit, I am not very good with getting my haircuts.  Part of the reason is because I didn't really start getting haircuts until I was about 17.  When I was little my hair wouldn't grow at all.  My mother once told me that she would ask the dr.s why I had so little hair and my sister had so much,but they weren't really sure.  So in order to get it to shoulder length I grew it for about 13 years before I got trims.  

Then when I was about 16 I went shoulder length which was a bit of a shock but nothing dramatic.  And then when I went to college and was done with things like dance that required my hair to be tied up, I really chopped it off.  As in like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors.  I was worried everyone would hate it but they liked it.  So I continued to get it chopped fairly short every few months.

Then when I came to Japan I was too nervous to get it cut due to a lack of communication between the hair dressers and myself.  I had no clue how to say, Just a bit in the front and to the hairline in the back, in Japanese so I let it go to shoulder length.  And it has been that way for quite a long time.

Last Friday, though, after buying new contacts in the neighborhood I used to live in, I stumbled into a hair salon I used to frequent when I lived in Tsuyama.  The hair dresser (after giving me a shampoo and a message which is complimentary with the cut in most salons in Japan) pulled out a bunch of photos of different girls and asked which one I wanted.  This is always difficult as a) it is hard to picture myself with an Asian person's hair, b) bangs and mullets are really popular in Japan, c) I'm pretty clueless as it is anyway and never no exactly what I want.  I'm also sure that the guy who was going to cut it wouldn't understand, Meg Ryan in French Kiss or You've Got Mail.  

So I pointed to a girl with a curly (no doubt permed) bob that was just about ear-length and said in choppy Japanese, "This will do but feel free to do what you want."  I then took off my glasses (I had bought the contacts but hadn't put them in yet) and settled back to listen to the really good mix of Christmas music going on (including some country hit entitled, All I Want for Christmas is a Real Good Tan).

30 minutes turned into 60 and then into 90.  At one point the guy cutting my hair stopped the cutting and had me put on my glasses to see what I thought.  The hair looked about perfect so I thanked him and started to stand up, but he said, "Wait, wait!  I need to even up some in the back and thin out some around your face."    

I sat back down not wanting to have an uneven line and sat for what I thought would be another 5 minutes tops.  This turned into 15 minutes which turned into another 30 and then another 60.  At this point I could definitely tell that he was cutting it too short and that I was not going to be happy.  

But, despite knowing full well how to say, "That's enough I think," in Japanese, I couldn't bring myself to say anything.  Part of the problem was that he would blow dry the hair and muss it all about, leading me to believe that he was finished only to start cutting again.  He seriously did that about 3 times and I really wanted to laugh out of nervousness but was afraid I would upset him.

When he finally finished I politely said thank you and ran back to my car.  I didn't cry (I am not THAT attached to my hair) but I was feeling quite upset.  It did help that the following night I went out in Osaka for a friends birthday and we went to clubs where all sorts of Japanese people stopped me to say "Kawaii!!!!"  I know, I know, they do that to anyone white with blonde hair, but it did help.  And I found a nice hair band that would have looked ridiculous with my longer hair.  still I dreaded facing the students and don't want to go home and see everyone when my hair is this short...

This isn't the first time this happen and I always ending up getting upset at my cowardice in the salon chair.  I remember one time when my hair wasn't cut short enough and when I confessed that to my mother (who had  right away, "You look like you didn't get anything done") she took me back and had the lady cut more off.  The hair dresser was totally fine and didn't charge me anything extra.  Another time when that happened in Japan I ended up just cutting a bit off myself when I got home.

Last summer when I was at a salon in Des Moines and was just about to pay the bill, Maggie (my sister) came in loudly and stated, "That isn't the color you said you wanted at all."  But with color I really felt that their wasn't much that could be done.

How about you?  Are you able to tell the hair dresser when you are upset or when to stop?  Or do you just go home and wait for it to grow back and the color to fade?