Goodbye red head.. T__T

Uncle Yenny has learned 2 profound lessons:

1. Never trust a guy's opinion on hair stylists, unless he's gay.
2. Never expect a Korean hairdresser outside of Korea to actually know what they're doing (no matter how "professional" they proclaim to be -__-).

Yesterday I spent a gruelling 5.5 hours in a hair salon that a male friend had so exuberantly recommended, only to emerge looking and feeling like sh*t.

Here's what happened:

I went there wanting to restore my hair to how it looks when I walk out of my regular salon back in Korea:



I explained to the main stylist what my hairdresser in always Korea does -- fix the regrowth by lightening the roots first, shampoo it all out, and then cover the whole length of hair with red. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well the first attempt to lighten the regrowth was an epic fail. It turned out completely patchy, with some parts bright blonde and other parts still stark black. I was quite shocked, but relieved when they started trying to fix it by applying bleach a second time. Only this time they left it in for too long -- causing my scalp to itch and burn, and the roots to become 3-4 times lighter than the ends of my hair. And as you probably already know, lighter hair picks up color more easily. So, when they finally applied the red color to my whole head, the darker lengths of my hair didn't change much, but my roots, which were way too light, became a ridiculous, blinding shade of red. Think Ronald McDonald on crack cocaine, with phosporous injected into his locks. Yeah. Not pretty, huh?

Oddly enough, none of this seemed to faze the main stylist at all. In fact he decided that he could fix the problem easily by coloring over the roots again... with the same color.

-____-

It was at that point that I began to wonder whether he actually knew what he was doing or not. Granted, I am definitely not a hair stylist myself, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that if you want to make something darker, you don't paint it the same color that it already is, you paint it with.. oh, I don't know, something DARKER maybe? .__.

When I tried to tell him this, that maybe he should use a darker color, he simply said, "Yes, yes, this will make your hair color darker." Perhaps it was my fault for not trying to clarify my point any further, but I decided to just let it go, especially since he had already started plastering the dye onto my head. Communication fail.

As it turned out, communication was not the only thing that failed.. The second round of hair coloring did nothing to darken the top of my hair, just as I had thought.

In a final, desperate attempt to fix the situation (it was then 2 hours after their usual closing time), they decided to whip up a darker color by mixing red, purple, and black. By that point they had shampooed and blow-dried my hair four times, leaving the skin on my head incredibly traumatized, dry, and raw.. And every single stroke of the applicator brush felt searingly painful. When it finally came time to shampoo -- for the fifth time that day -- my head literally felt like it was on fire, and they were forced to use cold water because the warm water stung so much. Afterwards, they couldn't blowdry my hair without me flinching, because the warm air kept burning my head.

And, wouldn't you know it.. As Murphy's Law would figure, the color of my hair came out wrong. Yes, they had managed to finally darken my overbright roots, but in the process had made the rest of my hair become too dark as well. So instead of the nice, solid shade of red that I had wanted, my hair is now a shitty, dark maroon-brown-black kind of color:



..exactly the kind that I could have achieved on my own with a home coloring kit. =__=

To be fair, they did apologise a few times, and they were all friendly. But let's face it.. When you go to a salon, you're not paying shitloads of money for friendly, you're paying because you want good results. Therefore I was not very impressed that they still made me pay full price for something that wasn't even what I'd asked for, and had taken nearly 3 times longer than it should have.

And the best part of all? After leaving the salon, I discovered that while the top layers of my hair look fairly even, once you lift them up there are patches underneath where they failed to color properly and the roots are still a heinous, mismatched shade of bright red.

Fan-f*cking-tastic.

So there you have it. Two profound lessons to heed. Hopefully no one else will make the same mistakes I did.