How To Fix A Terrible Haircut
[ 15 March 2008 ]
A bad haircut: unfortunately, it happens more often than it should.
So, what can you do when your hair ends up shorter on one side than on the other? Or if your fringe is about 3 centimetres too high? Or if your hairdresser, who refused to listen to you, snipped off all the volume & bounce you’d been growing out for months?
Trot back to the hairdresser
This is the first & most obvious solution, though it is one a lot of people never try. Sometimes because they fear the wrath of the hairdresser (very sharp scissors strike terror into the hearts of many!), but usually just because we feel uncomfortable or awkward telling someone that what they’ve done isn’t up to scratch. I understand, I’ve been there — but it’s really important that we learn to say “This isn’t good enough” without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings or having someone dislike us. You don’t have to stomp in there & make a scene; it’s about being assertive. Most hairdressers are good sorts & they want to do their best, so if you go in & have a quiet word, chances are extremely good that they’ll make every effort to fix up your hair & please you.
Think about it this way: you’ve paid the money, so you should get what you want. If you bought a vacuum cleaner & it stopped working, you’d take it back, right? You wouldn’t sit around at home feeling bad about it & chewing your nails into oblivion while deepening your worry-lines!
It’s a simple business transaction, & it’s a good way to practise letting someone else know what you want. (If you can’t tell a hairdresser, how are you going to tell your spouse or employer?) If you want to have a good relationship with the person who cuts your hair, you need to be honest & let them know if something isn’t working. They want your business, so it’s in their best interests to help you.
On the other hand, if the haircut is so bad that you daren’t go back for fear you end up bald, perhaps the next step is for you!
Go somewhere else
It depends on the haircut, but sometimes the only thing to do is rush somewhere else & beg them to fix your mane. If it’s really, really bad, you might want to do it straight away, but if it’s bad-but-tolerable, give it a couple of weeks to grow out before you sit back down in the coiffeur’s chair.
Now, this is one time you really don’t want to skimp on a haircut. You’ve just had your tresses butchered, so don’t take any chances. Go somewhere with a great reputation — your mileage may vary, but it’s hard to go wrong with the likes of Toni & Guy, Frédéric Fekkai or Vidal Sassoon. In fact, if you go somewhere really great, you may start to regard your bad haircut as one of the best things that has ever happened to you!
When you go in, tell them what happened. Give them some guidance — let them know what you actually wanted from your haircut initially. Then cross your fingers.
Buy some product & spend some time in front of the mirror
Sometimes you can fix a terrible do just by styling it differently. For example, if your fringe has been chopped so high that you look like an alien, maybe if you sweep it back off your forehead, you can make it look acceptable. You may find that you need to wear your hair differently in order to look sane, which is undoubtedly annoying & an inconvenience, but hey. Maybe it’s time for a change, anyway?
Try not to freak out about it too much, & don’t be afraid of looking different. Surely if you’ve had your hair the same way for 5 years, it’s time to do something new!
If you’re having trouble coming up with a new style, call a friend & tell them to come over with their GHD & all the hair product they can muster!
Go hat shopping
My friend Ana is very keen on giving herself haircuts whenever the fancy strikes her. Generally she manages to restrain herself from doing too much damage, but once, she went too far. She hacked her hair so short that she looked like she’d just escaped from a lab experiment. It was a bad look. Ana is a stylish girl but even she didn’t know how to style or fix something so appalling.
Luckily, Ana is a fashion designer — & very handy with a sewing machine. She found some crazy faux fur fabric which was black & white with long strands of fur rather than the short stuff, & sewed it into a hat-shape. It looked great & because the pieces of fur were so long, she could kind of style them — pulling them up & out, twirling them around, etc. She called it her “wig” & she wore it for three months straight.
While you don’t necessarily have to make your own hat, going on a bit of a search for some cute hats that will save your dignity is a very good idea. You might like to buy a few different ones — a slouchy beanie, a fluffy beret, a fedora, a couple of turbans… There are no rules on what you can or cannot wear (& these days, thankfully, it’s socially acceptable for women to wear hats indoors), so have a hunt around & see what you can find!
Invest in a bunch of different scarves
“Hand me my scarf!” This is usually my default response to a bad hair day. I actually have a huge drawer full of them, overflowing with different colours, patterns & fabrics. You can never have enough scarves, & they are fantastically versatile.
Just lay it over the front of your hair & tie it behind your head, or you can fold it into more of a bandanna style if you like. There’s more information here!
Buy lovely accessories
It’s always fun to buy new things to put in your hair, & having a bad haircut is as good an excuse as any to go hunting for something fabulous! Investigate headbands with big bows on the side, huge diamanté slides, miniature tiaras, clips with cupcakes on & sparkly hair-ties. Splash out, go nuts — often, distracting onlookers with a huge glinting gee-gaw will mean they don’t even notice your botched haircut!
Super-love & cupcakes,
Gala
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Ack! This is perfect!
Gala, did you miraculously just happen to notice my “Help! Hair Emergency!” comment at the bottom of the last post? Well, probably not unless you are the fastest typer in the world.
Though mine is a growing out problem, not a bad cut problem. But still, a lot of this is sure to apply to me! Yee-haw!
When choosing a hairdresser, try to go to one that has ideas of her own. I always feel more comfortable when I go with someone who will listen to me, put in their own imput and try to make my haircut one of a kind.
Also, as a hairdresser, I want the person doing my hair to tell me how they styled it and how I could do it on my own.
If the hairdresser has you walk out of your chair without teaching you something about your hair, he/she didn’t really do anything for you.
If it’s really, really awful, you can always get a buzz cut. I’ve ended up doing this a bunch times, although not so much to get rid of bad hair cuts as that I got tired of dealing with my hair. The beauty of it is that even if it isn’t the best look on you, it’s so striking (especially on women) that it still creates an awesome style.
It’s important to have a hairdresser who understands and is willing to work with your style and your overall approach to your hair, rather than churning out a set number of standard cuts. No matter how hip those cuts are!
It took a long time to find someone who gets the fact that on the one hand, I’m really low-maintenance, but on the other hand, I love anything crazy far out. Now that I have found that person, I’m always very happy with my haircuts. Well, until mullettude sets in, anyway.
I’m going for a cut and colour tomorrow morning – hope this isn’t foreshadowing!!
I had a hairdresser who is an utterly lovely and charming person, and my 3-doors-up neighbour, but in the end I got so sick of going back to get her assymetrical efforts realigned (I have superfine, thick, dead straight hair) that I changed to a hair salon in the neighbouring town. They were always proficient and tidy, but in the end I got extremely frustrated with always saying “LONG at the front and SHORT at the back” to no avail (this was before V. Beckham and the Pob) that I started cutting my own hair. And that’s when I was spotted and asked to be a hair model, but I had to say no because I have it just exactly the way I like it :)
I get my hair cut with sewing scissors in my best friend’s living room (which, oddly enough, have been the best haircuts I’ve ever had), but I have had some truly awful haircuts in the past.
I usually find that pomps are a godsend for botched haircuts, as are bobby pins and hairspray.
really find some place with a great reputation. I get my haircut for 4 dollars, yes 4 dollars and my hairdresser is absolutely adorable and great! She always make it grow very fast. The place where I go is always packed and all the stylist are booked all day long.
I have what i like to call virgin hair… it has never encountered the likes of ANY product. it has an every other day meeting with the straightener but that is the farthest its ever been. so when i went to the hairdresser and asked “cut off an inch… two tops!” and she HACKED off 6 I WAS OUTRAGED!!!!!!!
i quietly told her she had cut off way to much of my hair and i was not happy at all with the cut, she informed me there was nothing she could do, i informed her there was no way i was paying
so i was completly stuck! i coudlnt style it a new way because i dont use product and never will, all the other hairdressers i went to said it was extentions or nothing… so me, my ugly hair, my grandmas collections of scarves, and my touque have been battleing it out. thanks for the helpful hints on hiding my locks.
I’ve done some hair modeling for my cousin (she’s a colorist apprentice, so I’ve gotten free dyeing/highlights, and next she wants to bleach me blonde!), so she asked me to come in and help out her friend and have him cut my hair. Since my hair’s so short, I have to go in about every other month or so, so it was time for a cut anyway. Needless to say, it was not the haircut I wanted!! It was really uneven overall — some of it was cut too short, and some (the back!) was left too long.
I booked an appointment with my regular hairdresser (who is incredible and gives me the best haircuts; San Francisco-area people, ask me for her info!) and was in the next week and swore never to be unfaithful again. Lesson learned. However, I now have a cowlick that never showed up before the bad haircut, and, three haircuts after the bad one now, still pops up (literally, straight up) from where he initially cut it too short. Curses!
I also had a horrific hair cut in middle school — seriously, it was bad — but I had asked for it to be like that. I don’t know what I was thinking.
i walked around with grey and ginger hair for a month before i plucked up the courage and went back and told them to fix this mess. it was meant to be black and white.
I love taking a risk and going to the student salon at work. these kids want to please so bad, they will do anything to get what you want. also only tutors cut your hair, so you get an incredible qualified person cutting you hair for $25.
The timing of this post is so funny, because I literally just got back from the hairdresser (not my usual place) with a pretty disappointing haircut. And was thinking about it as this page popped up!
Anyway, lovely tips. After spending a lot of time in front of the mirror playing around, I’ve made my piece with it — at least until I can afford to go to my usual place and get it fixed.
hellolovelylala.blogspot.com/
A few summers ago, my best friend at the time INSISTED I cut her hair. She said four inches all around, except two pieces by her ears that she wanted untouched. All right, I agreed. I hadn’t cut hair before, but I watched my own hairdresser all the time and I’m a quick learner.
So she sits down and I get a ruler and measure roughly four inches. I tell her.
“That is pretty short, your hair is pretty long, you’re not going to go into hair shock and freak out on me are you?”
“No.”
So I cut it down to four inches all around, and when she looks in the mirror. What does she do? FREAK OUT. She said I cut it too short, when in reality it was exactly what she asked for, just not what she expected. I felt horrible so I walked to the mall and bought her a brand new hat.
Since then she’s always kept her hair that short and gets compliments all the time. Great post!
Oh wow! Coincidence! I got my hair cut this morning, however I absolutely love my new do!! Almost crimson on top, black underneath and cut sort of a-line (very short at the back sloping down to about chinlength at the front) style.
However there are some really cool tips in here that I’ll probably use anyways :)
One of my friends tried to get his hair dyed from brown to a sort of reddish chestnut. His hair was ginger and wiry for months! He also had a blonde fringe which he let someone dye aqua, however after a few washes it was chlorene-green.
My biggest piece of advice. Once you’ve found the right hairdresser, stick with them. If the move salons, follow them! Don’t think, oh i’ll just try this new place, maybe its cheaper. Chances are you’ll end up disappointed!
I’ve had my fair share of baddies, actually more than my fair share. I’ve only ever found 1 hairdresser who knows how my hair sits and it able to cut it perfectly so both my natural curls and my GHD’d straight hair look stunning. I even travel 2 hours to get my hair done, even though I live in a big city full of hairdressers!
That is great advice, Tamara! We’ve known my hairdresser for so long that she comes to our house instead of my family having to go to a salon.
Tamara, I agree totally- it’s also much nicer to go to someone whom you know. My hairdresser and I always have a good chat when I go there; at any other salon it’d be 45 minutes of awkward silence.
My solution to a not-quite-right haircut has always been to take the scissors to it myself. This obviously has the capacity to go horribly wrong, but more often than not my hair has turned out the way I like it. I have quite a choppy, textured cut anyway, so a few misshapen locks won’t ruin it, and I can keep my fringe the right length this way.
I’ve lost count of the number of hairdressers I’ve had over the years.
In recent times, I had a GREAT hairdresser in the early part of this millenium, loved him to bits, a big Samoan bloke with big fingers and by far the best cutter on the planet. It was all good until my wedding day. He wanted to plaster my hair with product and make it looked “done”, wet, lacquered. I didn’t. We had agreed on a style and I told him: “I don’t want it wet/dark/lacquered: I want my natural blonde colour to show”. But no. We had a fight on that day, he charged me less than we previously agreed as a result, and I never went back. Breaks my heart.
The next stylist I had was a very efficient lady from Laos. She was quite good at telling me off!!! My biggest issue with her was that I wanted to grow my hair long and she insisted otherwise. Invariably I’d come home with it short and uninteresting all around. Easy to style, but just well, BORING.
Well: she was away on parental leave and another stylist on the team did my hair. She did an okay job of it until she completely coloured my hair (my first time) which looked lovely: but it was high maintenance. My desire was to have colour but I did not want to have it re-done every 6 weeks – it was just too expensive. So: I went back to get that sorted, and her boss whispers in my ear what I should say to her, and she still did what she wanted and didn’t fix the colour properly. Apparently her boss was afraid of her! Not long after, that stylist left. I went back once after that and thought I’d had enough.
So I didn’t get my hair cut for 8 months!!! I’ve never left it so long. I was walking past good old Rodney Wayne (I’ve had an on-off relationship with them for years) in Cuba Mall (Gala will know where I mean, I think!) and stumbled on a wonderful lady in there that is the Wellington regional director. She’s cut it the way I WANT IT and she coloured it and it looked FABULOUS.
I have long locks now (yay!), but I have to admit they’re DRIVING ME NUTS. I can’t get the freakin’ stuff off my face, the wind has picked up in Wellington recently and I keep having to put my hair up in hairbands or clips. I see so many other women around and I can’t see why my hair can’t look long and sleak and not blowy-around like theirs. I don’t like a lot of product ‘coz it makes my scalp itch :(
I’m due for a cut this week. What to do… what to do….I keep hankering after a fringe (“bangs”), but I’m a big lass with a big face and we both think that a fringe will make me look even wider in the face… sigh.. :) So we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted lol :)
he he oh gala I remember writing to you about this very thing only over a month ago
I highly recommend if the hairdresser has cacked it up, go to someone who knows you well and go for something new, good things can come from bad
if I hadn’t had over 7 inches of my locks hacked off I wouldn’t have had the guts to have my new short do which is fab and I love
my advice to anyone who’s suffering a bad cut, be bold, roll with the punches and get a new style that normally you wouldn’t have the guts to do, if your super lucky you’ll end up like I did, totally in love with a new style and rocking it
don’t fall into despair over how bad it is, be assertive and take control in fixing it into something you’ll love
I also recommend changing hair colour too, right now I’m sporting black with a violent violet fringe :)
Oh my goodness I have had too many bad salon visits to count. Ugh. I’m much more open about what I want these days, though.
Recently my hairdresser was insisting that I let her blow dry my hair, even though I really didn’t want her to, because, after being bleached the hot air really hurts my scalp, and plus they charge you extra for it, AND usually style it in a ridiculous manner. I practically had to bark at her to get my point across.
I’m trying to grow my hair at the moment, and I will not under any circumstances let them do more than a tiny tiny trim, because not knowing what you want can be dangerous, as I have learned haha.
Great post, Gala. x
I’m to only female in my family to have ridiculously thick, curly hair so I had no idea how to look after it, made worse by the fact that it’s notoriously hard to take care of. I got such conflicting advice from hairdressers – use mousse/use only serum, have lots of layers/have no layers, wear it long/wear it short etc. – that I had no idea how to make it look good and how to have it cut until I miraculously got (fanfare) a hairdresser with thick curly hair! She showed me exactly how to avoid the mushroomhead syndrome (layers), gave me some product advice and forbade me from ever putting a brush to it while dry. A lifetime of mediocre haircuts SOLVED by finding a hairdresser who understood the perils of having a lion’s mane.
Great post!
Do you have a photo of Ana’s hat? Its sounds interesting and I want to see it!
jenny, lucky you for getting someone good at RW, that place (and by place i mean 4 different ones up and down the country) has made me cry so many times ill never go back.
Something I’ve noticed is that if you don’t like it when you get home, you might like it better once you’ve washed it and styled it yourself. Sometimes that looks completely different, for better or for worse.
I’ve always found that the bigger or busier the salon, the less time & effort they’ll spend on your hair. I used to go to my local Tony & Guy and although I liked the stylish atmosphere and I felt I was paying enough for a decent cut, I once came out with a cack haircut (the hairdressers description of ‘layers’ was “So how this will work is that when you turn your head upside down it will all be the same length!” – What? ). Since then I’ve based my opinions on the size and individuality of the salon and always found such places make more time for you and understand that everyone is different.
One time I got a haircut that made me look like Alan Rickman portraying Severus Snape. I had to put a million clips in it to not resemble a mop.
Gala, your Things I Love Thursday inspired my new blog!
Sarah… (just checked your website and I like your intro, girl esp. the sign in Pram… lol..): I have to agree about the whole RW thing. They CAN be hit and miss. To get the ALWAYS good stylists ya normally end up in the big smoke (read Wellington City) and pay $80+ for a wash/cut/style. I’ve been to a couple like that and while you get good results SHOULD you pay that much? I know their rent is higher etc but still. It’s prohibitive, really. Keep taking those photos… wow…
thanks jenny :) my mum read the intro and was like are you ok???
for real, i went to the weltec beauty school, got the best colour (3 lots of different colour foils, plus a base colour) cut, wash, dry and style for $55, and it was the best i have ever had. it was nearly a year ago and im still going on about it.
Quick question about good haircuts – where can I go in Melbourne for a good cut? I’m looking for somewhere I can go to get a ‘youthful’ cut :)
amber catch — Wildilocks! They have an ad on the side ;> I love them & their work soooo much that it would be totally remiss of me not to recommend them to you. They can do anything, from ‘normal’ to goth & everything in between — but everything they do is just exceptional. Go there!!!! & report back!!!!! xx
after years of bad haircuts and bad hairdressers, I think I’ve caught a lucky break! a friend of mines is a model and sometimes works for the vidal sasson salon, a place that under normal circumstances I could never afford to go, and she managed to get me and a couple of friends tokens for £10 haircuts and £10 hair colouring, and I’m getting my hair done on tuesday! yay! I’ll probably never be able to get my hair done there again due to student budgeting, so I’m really going to treasure this. wish me luck!
This is so appropriate, I get married this Sat and on Sat just been I went and got my hair highlighted, said I didn’t want it too blonde, I wanted to still look like a brunette just with some highlights. Well I’m as blonde as anything and my hairline looks terrible… Normally I’d probably just leave it but because it is something so important I’m going to have to go back and get them to fix it.
Gala, I second the “trot back to hairdresser” bit. I’ve gotten some OK haircuts but I wasn’t completely satisfied with them so my parents told me to go back. It usually works out to be better the second go-around!
Isn’t it terrible when you have to come back to this post in a time of need? =\ I had my first session for a hair modelling competition I agreed to do next month and my hair is yellow-blonde. In parts. The rest of it is my previous (lovely!) reddy-brown. I hate this skunk look, so I insisted we pressed onto session two tomorrow morning so at least I’ll be all over blonde rather than Cruella deVille… which will be a slight improvement. In the meantime I’m glad I bought a new hat recently!
hey, i just got my hair cut today and they cut it into a mullet, no joke. the front is long while the main body of it is overly short layers and the back was long. When i got home, i cut the back of hair off and now i just dont know what to do… this is terrible. and because it is soo short, there isnt much i can do to fix it and i cant hide it very well as i resemble a lttle boy with a hat on. Can anyone help?