Life Of A Hairdresser

How did you get into this line of work?

I never wanted to be a hairdresser. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to paint and I got bullied at school. In those days you could leave at the age of 15 and instead of staying on, taking my art exams, I said to my dad, "look dad, I can't hack school anymore. I've got to get out." He said, "what are you going to do?" I said, "I don't know. I'll get a job in the factory." My dad was a barber, he had a little two chair barber shop over in Essex. He said, "why don't you come in the shop and see how you get on?" I said, "well, I'll try it. Nothing to lose." I was more interested in girls in those days, anyway and I didn't have any real desire to be anything other than paint pictures. And within three months, I was cutting hair. I found hair dressing really easy, I never found it difficult. I used to stand and watch my dad. After watching him, you know, after a couple of months I thought, don't look too difficult, I'm going to have a go at that. Got the clippers and I was like, whee, I love this. It was a great sensation, cutting people's hair, and that was how I started. Never looked back, too.

What is the best part of your job?

The best part of my job is that it's one of these few jobs where you start a job and actually end a job. Most people play a part in a job but in hairdressing you do the zero to ten. And the best part is to see somebody that's just overjoyed with what you've done. And if you're good at what you do, you can get that hit ten times in a day. There's very few jobs where you can get what I call ten job satisfactions in one day. So that's definitely what keeps me still being a hairdresser. I love to please people. At the moment, I'm cutting cancer patients' wigs and that actually gives me even more satisfaction than cutting somebody's hair because you're doing more than just making them look good with their hairstyle. You're helping to give them their confidence, their femininity, self-esteem, and I think that is an incredibly big feedback to get in a job; to see somebody face that world and have all of those qualities I've just talked about. That's why I'm still here.

What is the worst part of your job?

The worst part of my job, the interesting thing in life is as you grow and climb that ladder of success, you have to get involved in other elements. Business, you know, in my case developing products, packaging, design and I have to go to business meetings, financial meetings. And the job that I was trained to do is the job that I do least of. So, the part I hate, or dislike most, is being dragged away into a financial meeting. To this day, I still don't understand half of what they're saying around the table and I just get really bored by it. So, in a sense, it's the distractions that are the worst part. When I'm doing hair, I'm in my little world and that's who I am, it's why I was put on this Earth and that's my passion. But I can't say looking at a spreadsheet of numbers or a profit and loss sheet does anything for me other than we made a profit. It's like yay, yippee.

What is the hardest part of being a hairdresser?

I think the hardest, most difficult part of being a hair dresser is when you, every day, have to put this brave face on, even when you're not feeling like it. Also, if you get a client that's rude, awkward, or difficult, it's sometimes very hard to keep that wall up. It can be really quite difficult sometimes, but you know this in the beginning when you enter the business; that you're going to get the odd clients that freak out, or whatever, or a client who doesn't like her hair and is going to complain. They're the bad, or downsides. However, thankfully, or hopefully, that doesn't happen too often.

Did you have a haircut that made you famous?

The haircut that put me on the map was a haircut called "The Wedge" and it was in 1974 and I kind of designed it by accident. I was asked to do a show in Paris for Vidal Sassoon and he asked all these art directors, me being one, if we could design a new collection of haircuts. I tried to do this one length haircut, really short but one length inside and it just looked like a helmet, it looked awful and I thought I've got to salvage this somehow. So, I brushed it back and in popped this heavy sort of movement and it went into a wedge shape at the back. People like David Bowie wore it, you know, I mean it was the club hairstyle of the 70's and that was an interesting time because I thought "If I can do that once, I can do it again, I know I can". One day I was working for a hair dresser called John Frieda and you had to use his method of drying hair, which was finger drying until the hair was dry and it took a long process. One day I tried to speed the process up and I said "Do you mind if I use the hair dryer madam?" and she said "no" so I got a handful of hair and I put the heat into it, held it tight until it cooled down, let go and it just went into this sort of curling and that's how the scrunch was invented, scrunch drying and nearly every woman in this world at one point in their life has scrunched their hair. That was in 1979, in 1980 I invented what is known as texturizing. I had this mad way of thinking in those days. I thought opposites work, up-down, in-out, black-white and I thought good haircut-bad haircut, but make it look good and in those days we were just picking hair up and cutting it like this. Well I picked the hair up and went right into it at different lengths and every hair dresser to this day texturizes hair, so there were 3 of my sort of milestone inventions that kinda got me up here.

Can you make anyone look good?

I think you can make anyone look better with what they are born with. With some people obviously the results will be better with others. But everyone can be improved, I have no doubts about that. The hundreds of thousands of people I have met, from celebrities down to your average person, can be improved. I really believe that a hairdresser can make a big difference to anyone's look. So I say “Yes”.

Whose hair would you most like to cut?

The person whose hair I'd like to cut most is a lady whose hair I have always wanted to do. I'll tell you why before I say who it is. She's the only person who can reinvent herself. Not just with a style of music or the clothes that she wears, but her hair too, and her hair has always been a very important part of her success story. The lady I'm speaking of is Madonna. If I were allowed to give her a new haircut, I know she would follow it through, right from head to toe. Not only do I like her as an artist, she's also the epitome of what I would call a pop fashion idol.