Sick of Black Hair Stylists, Pt. 2

Part 1 has gotten to be a fairly popular post to which many black women are letting me know they can relate. So, I’m temporarily coming out of retirement to do a Part 2. I just had to let other black women know about my most recent experience at the hair salon. Black women, if you know hair stylists, please share this with them because this true story has everything I hate about going to the salon and dealing with black hair stylists. These women need to learn about themselves and change their ways!

So, I commented on Part 1 that I needed a touch-up on my relaxer so bad but had not been to the salon in a long time because I just didn’t want to go. Part of the reason for that is because, at the end of last year, my regular salon closed down. This was the best salon I’d found in the area since I moved back in 2011. It wasn’t perfect, but, like I said, it was the best I’d found around here. I did not have a regular stylist there because they had a lot of turnover. But almost everyone who did my hair there was very tolerable. Still, not having a regular stylist left me with no one to go to when the salon closed down, and stylists around here have a habit of either going to shops that are too far away or…well, going to shops, which I’m done with because they’re not professional. I only go to professional businesses, even though they cost more.

So, there I was, back having to go through finding somewhere decent to go and dealing with someone new. Not looking forward to it! So, I kept putting it off.

It came down to two choices–Macy’s hair salon, which is in the same shopping center as the Regis hair salon that closed down, and a Regis that is in another shopping center that is not close to where I live. I tried to go for the Macy’s salon, but every time I called I was sent to voice mail. I was very close to making an appointment with the far-away Regis, but my mother suggested we just go on over to Macy’s and make an appointment in person. I didn’t like this, because if I needed to cancel what would I do? To me, the hassle to make an appointment in the first place was bad sign #1. Unfortunately, I listened to my mother, and I made an appointment in person and made sure to get the stylist’s cell phone number in case I needed to contact her.

So, my appointment was Friday. Now, I like to be the very first appointment at salons because I know the later you come in the longer you’ll be there, because you’ll most likely have to wait. Against my better judgment and because I don’t have a lot of time to be picky about appointments since I work overnight most nights, I went ahead and took the 2nd slot for Friday morning. Naturally, I get there on time and the stylist’s 1st appointment had just shown up. So, I knew I was about to waste several hours on my day off at the damn salon.

Surprisingly, 20-25 mins later, I get in the chair. Now, I had gotten accustomed to the way the women at Regis typically conducted their business, which I think is full of really good practices–plus, I’ve had several hair stylists who would treat new clients the way women at Regis treated me. One of these good practices was asking the client questions before pulling out relaxers and just getting started. I could see this bitch already had a relaxer out and was not about to ask me anything, and I really did not want my scalp sizzling. So, I spoke up and told her I have a sensitive scalp and that stylists usually use Mizani sensitive scalp on my hair. She told me she was using Affirm sensitive scalp. Now, I had someone at Regis tell me one time that they were out of Mizani and she was using Affirm, and that shit burned. Then another time I had someone tell me she was using Affirm, and it didn’t burn. So, I wasn’t sure what to expect and didn’t want to argue.

It started out fine, but she is one of those stylists who wants to leave you sitting in the chair for 15 minutes with relaxer in your scalp. Eventually, that got to my scalp, and it was burning. She comes back and starts breaking it down, and she asks me if I’ve “been saved.” Oh, boy. I knew what was coming, but I had no idea how bad it was going to get! This bitch started going on…and on…and on…about God, started bragging about her husband and how much they have, talking about opening a new church. She would not…shut…up! I seriously could not find a way to let this bitch know my scalp was on fire because she was too busy telling me why I should believe in God! And she kept stopping what she was doing with my hair, walking in front of me and doing hand gestures with all of her obsessive lecturing, while I’m sitting there with my scalp burning and my Friday morning and part of my Friday afternoon being wasted with her bullschitting. She never once asked if my scalp was burning, which is something most stylists do several times while they are relaxing your hair.

And when she wasn’t talking about God, she was talking about how good she knows she is with doing hair, how professional she is, etc. Meanwhile, I can’t get a word in edgewise, she’s gotten base all over my face, ears and neck (so much that most of it was still on me when I finally got home–too bad it didn’t help at all), and she is flinging relaxer on my face. Then she takes me over to the bowl to wash all of the relaxer out, and she is still going on and on about God and her husband the pastor, preacher or whatever the hell he is, while she is washing out my hair (and my clothes, with all the water she got down the back of my shirt)! She was also making comments about remembering my being “cute” and “quiet” from another salon, which I quit going to because it was horrible.

Um, okay–newsflash: quiet people can’t stand being told they’re quiet, and my experience with straight black women telling another black woman she is “cute” to her face is that is code for “I can’t stand your @ss!” and/or “You think you’re better than everyone else,” especially if you’re quiet and especially if you’re light-skinned (which I am). It’s really not a compliment, and, even if it was/is, I don’t believe it/feel that way and don’t want to hear it. Just do my hair and, except for asking professional questions, be quiet.

Eventually, we get to the point where stylists start asking about how to style your hair and cutting your ends and all of that, and she turns into one of those pushy types. Now, you have to understand that I’m not like other black women–I don’t care anything about hair styles. I go to the salon strictly to get touch-ups. This bitch starts pressuring me about cutting my hair into a style, gives two options and then was basically like, “Which one do you want?” Um, bitch, I don’t want either–I want you to do what I told you to do! I didn’t want her cutting my hair at all, even to clip the ends, and she was like, “Your hair is uneven here and here” and this and that and “I can’t let you leave here like this.” Um, I don’t care–like I said, I go to the salon for a relaxer, nothing else. I don’t care what my ends look like–I don’t want black hair stylists clipping my ends because 99% of the time they cut…too…much! I can’t keep long hair for schitt anymore because of these bitches!

Finally, this bitch takes a piece of my hair on one side, the side she was saying had uneven hairs, and said she was only going to cut that one piece and nothing else. She literally took the other side of my hair and said she wasn’t going to mess with it. So, I agreed. Long story short, this bitch ended up cutting my hair all over. Cut, not clipped. She kept taking pieces of my hair and snipping, and when you do that over and over and over again you’re not clipping or trimming a person’s hair–you’re cutting it, bitches!

And it goes without saying that I didn’t like my hair after it was done, let’s just save reading time by putting it like that. Plus, she used one of those really, really hot flat irons and was burning my scalp with it left and right (while running her mouth, of course)–she even burned my face, which now has a black mark on the right side!

Basically, it is Monday now, and Monday afternoon I washed my hair after spending $60+ to get it done on Friday. My hair smelled so bad, like burnt hair, that I was embarrassed to go to work last night. My hair normally smells bad after going to the salon, but this was just the absolute worst! And I don’t know if my scalp has ever burned as long as it has after this touch-up. I put oil, apple cider vinegar, etc, on it before and after I got sores, and still! It’s even still stinging in spots after washing it with cold water! The sores are healing, but the healing is making my scalp itch.

I would complain to a manager at Macy’s salon, except no one ever answers the phone and I have never seen a manager there. The phone rang several times while I was there Friday. The hair stylists simply ignore it. Between the type of service I received and the lack of business they’re getting by ignoring the phones, I am fairly certain that this salon will also be closing down in the future.

I am seriously starting to want to learn how to relax my own hair. I am running out of salons to attend in my area, and I am sick of these experiences with these bitch-@ss hair stylists. People have their point of view about black women and relaxers, but I seriously don’t care anything about hair beyond manageability. Because of this, I don’t want to relax my hair myself, and I don’t want whatever unknown issues come with having natural hair. It’s really that simple–it has nothing to do with wanting to be like white women or self-hatred. I’m just lazy as hell when it comes to hair. I would much rather hand someone money to have her spend a couple of hours doing schitt I don’t want to do for my hair, especially if it will make doing my own hair easier for a month or two, but it’s so hard to find someone who is not going to take you through a bunch of bullschitt and who is not going to hop from place to place and expect you to follow.

So, come time for my next touch-up, there I’ll be again–looking for some other place and some halfway decent black hair stylist to do my relaxer. [Sigh…]

I Am Sick of Black Hair Stylists

Update Feb. 8, 2016: Added a Part 2 post on this topic. Be sure to read and share it!

Warning: If you’re not a black American, you’re probably not going to understand this post.

I seriously just had one of the worst experiences at a black hair salon. The bad thing is it’s not the first time it’s ever happened. But I am fed up with it happening.

First of all, the salon I go to is one I’ve been going to off and on for the past four years. Sometimes I haven’t gone because I’ve lived elsewhere, but most of the time I stop going because I get pissed with whomever is doing my hair there. I don’t know about other places in the US, but in my city it seems as if black hair stylists are fine for a while and then they become unacceptable over time. They are all like this, if not just flatout horrible from day one. There is simply no such thing as “professional” here.

It’s also incredibly hard to find a black hair stylist who won’t completely ruin your day by having you there for hours for reasons that really have nothing to do with your hair. These bitches are slow, they talk entirely too much, and they act as if talking and doing hair can’t possibly be done at the same time. Between the two–talking and doing hair–talking is going to take precedence. They also like to book a whole bunch of appointments in a short time frame and then just leave the lot of women to sit around for at least half the day due to some combination of there being too many women booked, the bitch hair stylist moving like a damn tortoise and the stylist wanting at times to do everything except your hair–talking, cleaning, eating, processing payment, buying stuff from some guy coming into the shop trying to sell crap, etc.

I would be willing to bet that, even if it’s like this most other places in the US, this is compounded in my area by the fact that these are all black Southerners. I’ve lived in a lot of places, but I’ve spent more time in the Midwest recently than in the South. I’m from the South originally, but I honestly no longer feel as if I’m from the South. There are many things I’ve struggled to get used to since returning to the South. One of the biggest things that irritates me is just how slow Southerners are. I am a naturally impatient person–always have been. I don’t know how I was able to deal with Southerners bullshitting before, but now when I run into this–especially at places of service, such as department stores and hair salons–I really struggle to not just pick something up and throw it through a wall.

The thing that’s really funny to me is how no one else seems to be the slightest bit bothered by the snail’s pace at which everything is taken care of down here. I am baffled every time I look around a black hair salon, and that’s been the case for as long as I’ve been going to them, which has been at least since I was 12 years old. None of those black women have ever seemed to have a problem with the ridiculous wait times. I know I differ from black women in terms of how important getting my hair “did” is to me (I hate going to the salon, and I hate dealing with my hair at all), but damn. I don’t even have a life, and spending hours at the hair salon pisses me off. These women have kids, husbands or boyfriends, they work, have friends, etc. I see the same thing at department stores. People act as if standing at the counter for half an hour to get their purchases rung up is no big thing–and I’m just talking about actually making it to the counter, not even the extra time of standing in line. There’s often some old grandma or some overweight black chick taking forever to ring up your shit.

When I lived in Michigan, it took an hour to get my hair “did.” I would hop on one bus at the University of Michigan and ride it to the mall, and I’d be done in time to catch the next bus back to the university. My hair stylist there did one customer at a time. She did not overlap her bookings. She focused on getting women in and out, and she didn’t waste time by stopping and doing other things, talking, gossiping, eating, etc. When I do my hair at home, it takes an hour at the absolute most. I never give myself relaxers because I don’t know shit about hair and I couldn’t care less. I would not trust myself to give myself a relaxer and not do damage to my hair eventually. That’s really the only reason I ever set foot inside a hair salon. If I’m going to keep getting relaxers, someone else is going to have to do them for me–preferably a professional hair stylist.

Only today is seriously making me consider looking into no longer getting relaxers, just so I don’t ever have to deal with black hair stylists again.

My salon used to open at 10am, but the hours changed to 11am earlier this year. When I first started going to the lady who does my hair now, I told her I want to be the first appointment on the days I go. I told her this because I figured there would not be any waiting for her to finish someone else’s hair or alternating us between her seat. And that’s basically how it worked when they were opening at 10am. I was pretty happy with everything back then. I also try to go on days that are usually not busy, which means I will never go on Fridays or Saturdays, so that I can get out quicker. This was working, as well.

But when they started opening at 11am, I would come in and someone else would already be there getting her hair “did.” Apparently, this bitch hair stylist tells me every time I schedule an appointment that they’re opening at 11am but she will schedule someone else at 10am, who I guess requests 10am. So, today I thought to myself, “Okay, maybe I need to start requesting 10am.” With the way she’s doing things now, I have to wait on her to break with that customer who arrived before me and I have to alternate with that customer, which results in it taking longer for the stylist to finish with me. My time there started creeping up from 2 hours to 2 & 1/2 to, the last time I was there, 3 hours. This is exactly what I didn’t want. Understand that I have grown accustomed to maybe 2 or 2 & 1/2 hours at salons and not more than that since I have been going to better places and choosing better hair stylists since I no longer have to just go to whomever my mother goes to, i.e. I’m an adult now. My mother is more patient than I am, so she will deal with stylists who keep you waiting.

Anyway, so I’m rolling with the punches and trying to be okay with everything, even though it wasn’t going the way I preferred. And I need to mention that I’d started writing a sports piece this morning that I hadn’t finished but that I wanted to publish today, and the later I published it the less readers would get to it. There were hours and hours that were going by when it could have been up and getting hits on the internet while I was at the salon. There’s no internet at the salon–I can’t even get 3G to work on my iPhone there. But I was thinking that, at worst, I’d be there 3 hours and I could still get home, finish it and publish it. It’d be a tad later than I’d like, but it wouldn’t be too late.

That mentioned…I waited about 30 minutes for the stylist to get to me, and then she sat the other woman aside with conditioner in her hair while she gave me my relaxer. Eventually, she put me under the hair dryer to let my hair dry. Then she proceeded to leave me there for hours after she attended to customer after customer after customer. I seriously started thinking she’d forgotten I was there. She started out by styling the lady who had gotten there before me–who at that point probably had been there nearly four hours herself. Normally, if this hair sylist is alternating customers, then after she’s done styling one she’d come to me next and get me fixed up to head out the door. Instead, she brought back a customer who’d just arrived and started a full relaxer on her hair, THEN took her back to rinse out the relaxer.

THEN she left THAT customer at the sink to just sit there. So keep tally–she’s got me sitting under the dryer and she’s got another chick sitting at the sink. The chick who came first thing that morning had gone home, finally. THEN she brings back ANOTHER chick, and they both disappear. So, I’ve been under the dryer for almost two hours, which there was no reason for (I didn’t have a roller set or anything, just hair hanging straight down). I’m looking at my iPhone, like, “This is coming up on four hours, and I haven’t been styled yet, which will be another 30 minutes whenever she gets to that.” So, at about the 4-hr mark, I finally get up and ask another stylist there if she knew where the bitch had gone. She told me my stylist was in the wax room with another customer.

I’d seriously thought while I was sitting at the dryer about getting up and walking out without paying. But I decided to just go ahead and see if I could pay and just leave. Both of those women seemed to have a lot of customers coming in, plus they had a few women wanting to walk in without an appointment. The woman I talked to told me she would finish me. She told me this while she had a customer in her chair and had other customers there, as well, which probably meant I’d still have to wait…and even if I didn’t, it’d unfairly make her customers have to wait. But I told her I would like to just pay and go. She said she’d get my stylist so she could ring me up.

I kind of expected the bitch to come out apologetic, but she came out as if she had no idea what the problem was. The problem was that I’d been there for hours and she was steadily bringing other women back to work with them, creating a backlog, instead of moving people on in order. How was she going to do three different women at once? And the way things were going, there could have been even more women before she ever got back to me. I couldn’t just sit there and wait to see how many more women she’d start on before she finished with me. And then she was like, when I told her I wanted to pay and go,” But your hair isn’t finished” and “but your ends haven’t been clipped and they really need to be clipped.” If I had thought of it, I would have told her, “Well, you should have done that at least an hour ago, if you’re so concerned about it.” And she kept wasting even more of my time, trying to get me to stay and get my hair finished and such, looking at me like I’m nuts, like I did something wrong. Like I said, staying and getting it finished would have tacked on at least 30 more minutes. And frankly, my hair would have looked worse. Black hair stylists always spray a ton of shit in black women’s hair. My hair always looks too oily when I leave those salons. When I came home, I styled my hair in about 10 minutes, and it wasn’t all oily and full of itchy, stanky shit, either.

Needless to say, I’m not ever going back to that hair stylist.

These bitches do this all the time. In fact, I have left a salon once before with my hair not complete because of how long I was there. My mother thinks black hair stylists play favorites, i.e. they will put their “friends” and regular customers ahead of women who have been waiting but don’t come as often, regardless of when they were scheduled that day. And four hours might not seem so bad to some, even though there was no telling how long it ultimately would have been without my speaking up. But I used to spend 6 or 7 hours at the salon every weekend. I’m not going back to that. It’s completely ridiculous. It’s bad enough I have to spend that kind of time at work every weekday. I’m not spending a day on the weekend at another place I hate for that amount of time, as well.

So now, I will begrudgingly look into going “natural” and how to take care of/style natural hair. I really do not want to go natural–I don’t care how many black women out there poo-poo relaxed hair and think all black women with relaxed hair hate themselves/being black. I hate these bitch hair stylists and I’m sick of dealing with them. But I hate big booty, wavy, frizzy hair even more on me. Just being honest. My hair is too damn thick. It’s not like the little fine, barely-there hair many other black women have, thanks to all the damn white folks in my family (and I mean that sarcastically). I have tons of hair. I will look like a dark-haired clown with natural hair–actually, the more I think of it, the more I wish my hair would look that good natural–and I don’t have the time, patience or interest to figure out how to tame my hair, how to properly care for it or how to fit that big, booty shit in a scrunchy.

Well, this is going to be a great week, isn’t it? [This is the week, by the way, in which the male tech geek is off the entire week and I will be left alone with that female tech geek and some other lazy-ass nimrods. Just get ready for some great stories on this blog…I know they’re coming. Can ya tell I’m super pissed???]