There are a LOT of hair salons in China. Maybe their hair grows really fast…? I don’t know. So when we needed a haircut, in the below post, I decided on this one because the people inside were always really excited to see us walk by on our way to the market a few times a week. The staff seemed young and enthusiastic so I thought that was good.

Another lady at the hospital, Janet from the Phillipines, was eager to get her hair done, so I offered to go back with her and get my hair colour touched up in the process. I thought I’d go for something a little different so picked out a reddish shade, which they said they couldn’t do on my hair, so I picked out the slightly darker reddish brown. All went well and after the colour, wash and blow dry it was like the first colour I picked out. I thought that was great. THEN they proceeded to put the plastic apron on my again and seemed to be getting ready to start over. I questioned this, luckily I had my trusty Chinese-English dictionary with me, I pointed to ‘conditioner’? No, they said. In sign language they indicated that the roots did not match the ends and that they were going to fix it up. It looked ok to me but who am I to argue? I am not a hairstylist. So the process started over again, with what I could see was a darker colour. After the shampoo and blow dry, it ended up PURPLE!!! Not reddish with a tinge of purple, FULL-ON purple!

Again, with the help of my book I indicated that I was NOT happy with this, and that I liked the first colour and they had better fix it!!! Now the senior stylist took charge, he had only been consulting inbetween reading his kung-fu novel. Again the plastic apron, this time bleach. No measuring, but they did a test swatch first. In the middle of this one of the girls ran down to the nearby bakery and got me a juice and a coconut bun. I think she felt sorry for me, I had been there 6 hours. Well the story ends out well, they bleached it back to the original red, the roots are somewhat a different colour, but close enough. I grudgingly paid my $15 and went on my way. The moral of the story, don’t let anyone touch your hair if it looks ok in the first place!! By the way, Janet’s hair cut and colour turned out great!