When going for a haircut — and especially when changing up your hairstyle — it’s sound advice to bring along a photo of someone you’ve seen in a movie or a magazine whose mane you’d like to emulate. Say, for example, Brad Pitt’s golden tresses from Troy.
It isn’t, though, a strategy without its problems. “A lot of guys will bring in photos of other guys with hair that’s a completely different texture than their own,” Sunny Sepasi, a professional hairstylist and my girlfriend, explains. “I do the best I can, but there’s only so much I can do.”
Case in point: She tells me that she recently had a client with black hair come into the salon who showed her a picture of a natural blond, which was the new look he wanted. “At that point, it’s all about managing expectations and showing the client what our goal would be,” she says. “Because with two different people with two different types of hair, the results won’t live up to the photo — even if I do everything there is to do.”
There is, however, one photo that will always prove helpful — your own.
A few years ago, a genius redditor on r/LifeProTips suggested that, the next time you have a good hair day, you should take a selfie and show it to your hairdresser. “They’ll know what you want, and it’s a realistic, achievable style,” he wrote.
When I ask Sepsai how many times this happens in the non-Reddit world, she responds, “All the time. Sometimes I’ll even ask clients, ‘Do you have a photo of a haircut that you’ve had in the past that you really like?’ It makes the process much easier. It gives me a reasonable expectation I can work off of rather than having to figure out a way to tell them that what they’re asking for is impossible. It’s much more in the realm of possibility to give them something they’ve already had, or within the possibility of their hair texture/type. I can’t recommend the strategy enough.”
That, I believe, is what they call picture perfect.
Andrew Fiouzi
Andrew Fiouzi is a staff writer at MEL.
