Haircare: FAQ
How often should I get my hair cut?
The average regularity with which a person should get a haircut is every six weeks. When I say six weeks, that's for somebody who has a hairstyle. The reason you need it cut every six weeks when you have a hairstyle is your hair actually grows out of the hairstyle. It just gets too long so it doesn't stand up any more or doesn't do what it did a couple of weeks ago. But with long hair, you can let it grow longer because it's not a hair style, it's just long hair. All it's doing is getting longer. So you can probably go as long as two and a half, three months before you have the ends trimmed with straight, one length, long hair. But with hair styles, usually, the average client comes here every six weeks.
I'm dying my hair - how do I know which colour will suit me?
If you're dying your hair and you want to know what color suits you. Unless you've had it colored before, and that would give you some indication as to what you like and don't like. But, if you've never colored your hair before, my advice would be simply to do this. Go into a departmental store where they have a wig department and just ask if you can try some wigs on. Not for the hair style, but for the choice of color. Or hold the wig up to your face and see if it works with your skin tones. That's really about the only way you can safeguard yourself from choosing the wrong color.
Is using straighteners every day bad for my hair?
Using straighteners everyday will, in turn, damage your hair. And I can say that about curling irons, and even hair dryers. Anything in excess is going have an effect and be a negative effect. Straightening irons have been, in the last 10 years, the most used electrical appliance; they sell more than hairdryers these days. Interestingly enough, most women that I know have not only got one set, but two and even three sets of straighteners, always trying to upgrade. But there is an intense amount of heat that comes out of a straightener, it has to straighten curly hair, or straighten straight hair, and therefore in excess, used on a daily basis, you will notice a deterioration in the quality of your hair.
Can I slow down the greying process?
The answer is no, but what you can do is disguise the greying of your hair. If you add highlights into greying hair, it will give the effect that your hair is more highlighted than going grey, and that's what most clients go for. You don't have to have it retouched every month where the parting is growing and you see the grey hairs. And highlights, they sort of intermingle with hair and give the illusion that you're more blonde than grey. So you can't actually stop the greying process, but you can disguise it.
Should I pull grey hairs out?
There is no advantage to pulling grey hairs out. It does absolutely nothing other than you pull one grey hair out of your head, and when you think, you have many hundreds of thousands of hairs on your head. If you start pulling every single grey hair out, you're going to have no hair. It has no effect whatsoever.
How do I make dreadlocks?
To actually get a dreadlock you have to (a) grow your hair, and (b) not wash it. It's a natural process that Mother Nature does with hair, where it all kind of congeals together and forms a dreadlock. But having said that – that may be how you arrive at choosing to have dreadlocks, but once a dreadlock is a dreadlock, you should actually wash them. I used to do Howard from “Take That” and we permed his hair into dreadlocks. He didn't wash his hair for a year, and he came to me to have some bleach put in the ends, to make it look like he'd been in a very exotic, far-off land and bleached his dreadlocks. We applied the bleach, and it started to lighten the ends of his hair. But then we had to wash the bleach off. The water was black. I mean, absolutely jet black. So that kind of made me realize that you can actually wash dreadlocks. They don't have to be smelling and disgusting.
How do you prevent split ends?
Ends don't split on shorter hair styles because they never grow long enough to split. Split ends happen on long hair, mainly. Number one is regular cutting or trimming, rather. Number two is after you've shampooed your hair, and this is where a lot of damage is done, and it's so innocent and so many people do it, is when before you dry your hair, condition your hair and use a wide tooth comb so it runs freely through the hair, not getting the knots tangled. Because anytime you comb through a knot, you've probably broken three, four, five hairs, because you've gone through the hair. Where the real damage is done is when people get their hair, long hair I'm talking about, and they sort of turn that hair upside down, and they towel dry it like that. That friction is damaging your hair more than anything else you'll do with your hair. That is the main cause for split ends, is towel drying your hair like that. And not many people know it, and most people do it.
Can you repair split ends?
Once a hair is broken, it cannot be repaired. You can put certain products, like conditioners, that put a film over the hair and get that smoother effect, but you have not actually repaired the split end. It's just made it feel better.
Can I dye my blond hair black?
In a word, yes. You can dye your blond hair black. But it's not as simple as just putting a black dye on blond hair. You have to re-pigmentate the hair. In other words, you've got to add red into the blond hair. Otherwise, you're going to have to have an adverse effect. Then you put the dark color on top of that. So you have to have a base for the black dye to sit on, otherwise your hair could turn that green color we always hear about. So yes, you can dye blond hair dark, but there is a process and I would strongly advise nobody to attempt that at home. There is a professional way of doing it, a process, and it has to be watched carefully, so it should only be done by professional hairdressers.
How can you make straight hair curly?
There are about six or seven different methods of making straight hair curly. The obvious one is to perm the hair, but nowadays very few people have perms. I can't remember the last time a client came in here for a perm, and I'm talking about months. You can curl hair with rollers. You can curl hair with curling irons. You can curl hair by doing what is called pin curl, which is where you take the hair and you literally make it almost like it's around a roller, but there's no roller, and then you pin it. You make hair curl that way. There are many appliances in the electrical departments that do all kinds of waving and different types of curls. You can use these bendy rollers that you just roll in and you clip over. You can even use the same principle in using rags; you an get a piece of rag, tie it, sleep on it, and make hair curly that way. There's a multitude of different ways of curling hair, and my advice when a client comes into the salon and says, "I want my hair curly", due to the fact that there are six, seven, eight different ways of curling hair and they all give a somewhat different effect, the best way is to say to the client "Well look, have a look at our hair magazine and just tell me what type of curl you want", because a permed curl is not like hair that's curled in a roller. It's a completely different curl but they're both curls. So, to identify you have to be a bit more explicit and this is where the problems lie with clients. They don't quite get the curl that they thought they were going to get because it's been misinterpreted. That's why a photograph pinpoints the type of curl and then the hairdresser should then say, "Yeah, that's done with a curling iron".
How can you make curly hair straight?
To make curly hair straight – there are several methods. The obvious one is to blow dry your hair with either a large round brush or a paddle brush which is a flat sort of brush; that's another type of brush. Or what we call a Denman brush is another good brush for straightening hair. And literally, by towel drying your hair, blasting it sort of semi-dry, and then with a brush, just pulling the brush, followed up by the heat of the hair dryer, that will make hair straight. Straightening irons are the quickest and probably the easiest way of straightening curly hair. But having said that, you can; chemically straighten hair. Black people do that an awful lot, but they have their own type of products and they're not really suitable to be used on Caucasian hair because the structure of the hair is different. But we do have chemicals for Caucasians where you can straighten hair. Does it damage the hair? Anything that's chemical that's added to hair will have some sort of damaging effect. Therefore, the application is what's most important so whoever is technically applying this product to the hair has to be a professional. Otherwise, there can be hair loss, you can have your skin burnt if it's not applied correctly and it can really dry your hair out. So therefore, you see, straightening hair is basically the opposite of curling hair. Instead of putting a roller in and curling it and putting perm lotion on, you're doing the opposite. You're pulling the hair straight, but you're still putting lotion on, but you're combing it straight. So it's a perm in reverse. And you can have disasters with perms - as many people in this country have had at some point, maybe a even burn, or it's gone frizzy because it's been left on too long. The same things can happen when you straighten it, so that's why it needs to be a professional to do it.
Can shock make your hair turn white overnight?
Shock can make your hair turn white overnight. In 42 years of hairdressing, I've heard of it happening three times. But it has to be a traumatic, obvious shock and I've heard in one particular case the individual literally went to bed one night and woke up with grey hair. I've also heard, almost even worse, that again, through a severe shock, an individual has gone to bed, woken up and seen the hairs on the pillow. All their hair just fell out overnight. But these are traumatic situations which are very rare. As I said, I have only heard of three in my lifetime. Those are the only cases I know of though. Obviously it could be that there are many more.
How do I know if a hairstyle will suit me?
I think everyone knows themselves to a certain degree. You know if you have a long face, or a fat face or heart-shaped face -- you just look in the mirror and you can see that. There is no guarantee that you're going to like any new hairstyle. There is NO guarantee. What you can do is cut down the limitations of going wrong. And I think really the best way -- again, depending on your age, and fashion sense and all of that -- is to look at these hair magazines and just flip through, and invariably if you like something, it's because you identify with it. And 9 cases out of 10, that'll suit you. That look just has to be customized for you as an individual. So therefore -- again, there's no guarantee that you're going to like it -- but if you like what you're looking at, the chances are you'll like it applied to yourself.
How can I limit damage to my hair from blowdrying?
Well, to avoid damage by blowdrying, basically you just can't do it too often. There's hair dryers and hair dryers. I must say, I mean if you go to a hotel and use the hair dryer that's on the wall, you can probably use that every day for the rest of your life and it wouldn't do much damage because there's very little power. But when you're using professional hair dryers, and you can buy these in the stores in High Street, that have a lot of power, then you literally can damage your hair. If you do that every day, and a lot of people do blow dry their hair literally every day, then you're going to have a damaging effect after a period of time. So, the only thing you can really add on top of that is then get the best shampoo and conditioner, and maybe once a month give your hair a treatment and add moisture back into the hair. Because if you think of the intense heat that comes out of these electric appliances, there's only one effect, and that's a drying effect. So to add moisture back in is really your only substitute if you're not prepared to blow dry your hair less.
How do I manage frizzy hair?
There's always a, dry quality to curly hair. And therefore, you can't change the structure of hair but what you can do is diguise the hair by using products like, for example, serum. Just a coating of serum in the palms of your hands and just literally massage it into your hair will define the curl and seemingly reduce the frizz. But it is a temporary thing. Everytime you wash your hair. We haven't changed the structure, all we've done is disguise the frizz really, by using a very light maybe even a, some sort of a styling cream or some soft, liquidy product that, that just can be evenly applied throughout and disguise frizz.
What can I do if I don't like my haircut?
If you don't like the haircut that you've just been given- I can only tell you about my policy in my salon. If somebody is really upset about their haircut, and they have reason to be upset with their hair, that's bad enough, but to have to pay for it is rubbing salt into the wound, when you've actually got a haircut that you don't like. I mean, if you went into a shop and bought a sweater, and you took it home, and you tried it on again, and thought 'nah, I'm going to take this back', you'll get a full refund or change the garment, and I think hairdressing should be like that. That's my policy and philosophy. I refund- well, I just don't take the money in the first place for a bad haircut. And then we'll offer a backup haircut service, and say 'Look, what is wrong?' 'Well, it's too short', 'Well, alright, well come back to us in six-to-eight weeks if you want to, and we will give you another, complimentary, haircut, until we get it as you want.' You might think to yourself, 'well, oh she didn't like the haircut, and she was a pain, whatever', but you've actually just lost a client, and as a hairdresser, clients pay your rent, your wages; put food in your mouth. So every client is really valuable to a hairdresser, and if you can salvage a client, it's well worth the effort, and it's certainly worth not accepting their money after a bad haircut. Because they may leave my salon saying, 'Look at this haircut! I hate it!', but they'll also be able to say, 'But it was quite fair, he didn't charge me, and he's allowing me to come back until they get the haircut right.' And they may think I'm not the best hairdresser in town, but they might think I'm quite a fair person. That's the way I treat a situation like that.
How should I get my hair cut if I am trying to grow it?
If you're trying to grow your hair, and you still need it cut because you haven't got it where you want it to be, the best way to have it cut varies. Say for example, you're trying to grow your layers out. Your hair is jaw length, and you want to grow it longer. You can either just let it grow, but you want one-length hair, and at the moment you've got layers. The top layer of your hair has got to grow further to get it where you want it to be, and the bottom length of your hair, which is nearer where you want it to be anyway – you just want, say, three more inches. So the idea is to just keep cutting the bottom layer of hair and let the layers gradually grow down. If you just want to grow your hair, the only way to grow hair is to grow hair, and the more you have it cut, the longer it's going to take. So if you can go maybe three, four months without nipping the ends, and when I say “nip the ends”, I just mean the very ends, and that's the quickest way to growing long hair and still having it cut at the same time, so it's kept healthy. A lot of young people will identify with what I'm about to say. A lot of people that grow their hair, the hair won't get any longer than a certain stage before it starts petering out and going thin and wispy and splitting on the ends, and I hate to see hair that just fizzles out into nothing just because somebody wants to hang on to the length of their hair. I think it's much better to be shorter, but healthier.
What do you think is the most beautiful hairstyle?
If anyone ever asks what the most beautiful hairstyle I can think of is, I say it's long hair. To see Asian hair that shines like glass and that's cut very blunt at the bottom is the most beautiful, and I think most men would agree with me. Maybe not brunette, maybe it would be a blonde, but the most beautiful hairstyle would be long hair.
How can I find a decent hairdresser?
I always think that if you live in a town outside of London and you're trying to find a good hairdresser in your local town, my advice is to look for the smartest salon there is. You might think, what's that got to do with finding a good hairdresser? Anyone that owns a hair dressing salon that is serious will invest into their business and make it look modern, smart, and up to date. They will have hairstyles that are happening now in the windows, versus going past a salon where they obviously let it dilapidate. Maybe there are net curtains up or a picture that's so sun bleached, and you just think they can't be as serious as the very smart salon that's invested. Also, you'll find good hairdressers in any salon that has a training programme internally, because they are again investing back into their own business; a training programme, which has all got to be paid for by the owner of the salon. The other way is that if you've got the nerve (I haven't but a lot of people have) and you see somebody in the street and you like their hair, just go up and say, "Who's your hairdresser?" If you like their hair that would mean that if that's the sort of thing that you want, and the chances are that whoever did it to her will do it to you. Word of mouth is another way, and also reputation. You don't get a good reputation in any industry unless you're good at what you do. If you've got a good reputation in your town and people know 'he's the number one hairdresser', chances are his training program will be there, his salon will be smart, and he would only employ good people. Good hairdressers gravitate to good salons. Why would a good hairdresser go to a little, what I call "sweaty Betty" shop? I mean, if you're that good, you wouldn't go downmarket; you want to go upmarket. So, if you go to the best in your town, then they're going to attract the best hairdressers in the area.
