Smiling sweetly at her, I went back to combing out the knots. “Straighteners do curls just as well as curling irons. We’ve got the Cloud—”
“Look,” she interrupted, “I want you to do them with the biggest curling tongs you’ve got in this tiny salon.”
In the reflection, I saw almost everyone in the place look around them. See, Delicious Divas wasn’t a ‘tiny salon.’ We had ten chairs with their own workstations and five beauty rooms at the back of the property. But, it also had to be said, all ten of those workstations were filled and booked out two months in advance, and our beauty rooms were doing well, too.
Would I rise to the woman’s put down, though? Would I shit.
Holding a finger up at her client to indicate she needed a minute, Jacinda joined me in front of the woman with the same expression on her face that I had on mine.
“We’ve got every device in this salon you can imagine—including the large barrel curling tong you’re talking about. However, after seeing that video of the girl using one and burning off a chunk of her hair, poor Evie’s traumatized. I can assure you she creates fabulous curls with the straighteners she uses, and because of their temperature, the curls last just as long as the curlers would. If you’d like—”
“What video?” the woman snapped, interrupting her. “I’ve been using curling tongs for years, and I’ve never known anyone to burn their hair off.”
She hadn’t been doing this job, obviously, then.
Some of the most common jobs we had were either fixing a home hair dye job gone wrong, a home trim gone wrong, a tremendous drunken idea gone wrong, a joke gone wrong, or someone using a cheap curling iron/straightener/heated roller brush that’d fucked up their hair. Oh, or someone trying to straighten it with a regular iron and leaving it on for too long and burning off their hair.
Until I’d watched that viral video and seen the poor young girl holding a chunk of hair in her hand, with an inch of burned hair remaining on what was left of the lock she’d been curling, I’d felt confident about the quality of the devices we used…
Now I was scared even to put one near someone’s head.
Not wasting a second, Jacinda pulled her phone out and found the video—obviously having saved it, but don’t ask me why.
The woman’s sneer quickly turned to horror as she watched it.
“Tell you what, I’ll do the curls for you with the curling tongs, and Evie can take over my customer,” Jacinda said loudly, winking over her head at me.
“I’m game!” the lady whose hair she’d been working on said immediately. “Doesn’t matter which one of you ladies does it, my hair is always rockin’ when I come out of here.”
Had I mentioned we were the only hair salon in town? There wasn’t even one in the town next to ours, so before we’d opened, the closest one had been over twenty-five miles away. That was a pain in the ass just for a trim or haircut, so we were popular. We were also well trained, so we did our jobs correctly and made sure we never sent people away without one hundred percent satisfaction.
Well, ish. Obviously, we had to go back to and fix issues, like women who dyed their hair black at home then hated it and came to us to fix it. Those jobs weren’t entirely fixable with just one appointment. The damage done as we stripped out the dye and then dyed it again to the color they wanted needed to be fixed, and sometimes it took a couple of tries to get the dye out anyway.
Or the women who wanted it all cut off and who then hated how it looked. I was trained to do hair extensions, so I got those to fix. We had emergency appointments available for those cases, and it wasn’t unusual for us to offer to stay late to do them.
So, we sent a vast majority away with one hundred percent satisfaction and aimed to make the small percentage who weren’t satisfied by working to fix the issue.
Just as I moved to where Jacinda’s client was, the woman whose hair I’d been working on grabbed my hand. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to use them after that. Can you use the straighteners and show me how to do it at the same time?”
The power a video of someone fucking up had over us… it was crazy but real.
As I worked, I explained how I was doing it and how to get the best results until the lady had a full head of perfectly formed curls that she admired in the mirror.
“Girl, you’re a genius.”
Oh, how quickly people’s opinions and comments changed.
I couldn’t hold it against her, though. If there’s something we like, it’s usually ingrained in us to stick with it. So why fix what isn’t broken? Well, that was until you found out it could break you, and not even a little bit.