I Left Something at the Salon

My hair!

Today I served as a hair model for my friend Audrey, who's a stylist for Art + Science. They'd had an instructor from Sassoon in Chicago come to the Halsted Street location this morning to teach a class on Sassoon techniques, and then the afternoon was spent putting those techniques into practice.

I got to the salon around 1 p.m. and left around 4:30, which sounds like a long time, but there were around eight stylists, all doing step-by-step cuts under the Sassoon instructor's guidance, so there was a lot of watching other hair cuts, listening to techniques, and then having eight stylists crowded around Audrey's station while they talked about my hair. It was, in all honesty, totally and absolutely fun. I had two cups of tea, time to flip through trashy gossip magazines and time to catch up with Aud, who I haven't seen in 1,000 years and who recently went on a two week walking trip/pilgrimage through Spain with her mom (my godmother), and I got a spectacularly technical and precise haircut for free! It does not get better than that.

For the past six months or so I've been "growing out" my hair, and I kind of intended to continue doing so through this semester. But I've been so bored with it that on Christmas morning I chopped off some bangs for myself, just to give it some shape. It's not terribly uncommon to want to cut five inch chunks out of your own hair first thing after looking at yourself in the morning mirror; but it's maybe a little rash to actually do it. Here's the old hair (picture from ten days ago):

Me and Julie at our girls' night dinner on Dec. 30

 And here's the new and absolutely improved hair:

It's gone! It's all gone!

It's not like I haven't gone short before; I've had short hair for years at a time in the not so distant past. But today's experience was so much fun, and I had so much taken off in one fell swoop (although that makes it sound violent and arbitrary, which is completely antithetical to the actual event) that I just had to write about it.

When Audrey and the instructor were first starting my cut, they decided that it would be a "B" style (I do not know what that means but I'm pretty sure it's remarkably like what you see pictured above), and then the instructor drew a little diagram on the mirror using a little head stencil:

The left is technique that will result in a bad pizza slice effect. Audrey did not give me a pizza slice head.

What you can't see from this diagram is that the stencil had a little face, too. It was super weird and fantastic; Aud and I agreed that we both really wanted one to use at home on our bathroom mirrors.

I also learned today, during the consultation/planning steps of the process, that I have a small head--finely shaped, they assured me, but small. I'm okay with that, but it makes me sure that I shouldn't ever shave my head or I might look like a little rounded pencil eraser about to fall out of its little metal holder. Yep. I just compared my head to a tiny rubber eraser.

When the afternoon was all said and done (I was the last model to finish), I was thrilled with my new hair and my reunion with Audrey. But we're going out to brunch on Sunday, because even after three hours, we still have more to chat about (and she reminded me that I never did a follow up post about our kitchen remodel, so shame on me, and you can all expect that soon).

Me and gorgeous Audrey