Hair Care

Bad Haircut? What to Do When Your Stylist is Convinced It's Great

The art of politely informing your hair stylist that you hate what she's done to you

by Emily Woodruff | 4 COMMENTS

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When the Cut is Just...Bad Amanda wanted a touch-up to her old style, which was an edgy, layered look that complemented her New York lifestyle. She showed the stylist a picture of her old haircut and a few similar styles to give her something to work with. "I told her I wanted a basic cleanup, maybe 3-4 inches off, and choppy layers up top that would get increasingly thinner on the way down," she says.

What she got: "My bangs were repulsively short, and the left side of my hair was obviously longer than my right," says Amanda. "She obviously didn't know what a layer was. But I just took one quick glance at it after she finished and didn't realize right away that I hated it. I knew immediately it wasn't what I asked for, but I'd never had a horrible haircut before, so I just assumed it was fine, even if it wasn't perfect. I said a quick thanks, because I felt so awkward saying anything negative after all that time I spent chatting with my stylist, getting all chummy. I didn't realize it was way too short and completely uneven until it was too late."

How she handled it: "I would call back in a different situation, but I booked the haircut through a discount site and it was so cheap I didn't feel like I had the right to complain. Plus, she was talking to me throughout the whole haircut about being a single mom and telling me personal things, and I felt guilty. I didn't want my bad review to be one more thing on her plate. Plus, I just didn't want her to touch my hair ever again. The errors she made were unbelievable."

What she should have done: Petroff says that Amanda should have spoken up about the unevenness and lack of layers. "In that situation, I would just ask the stylist to double-check the length," he says. Hairstyles with bangs are a different story, though. "There's really nothing you can do about that then," he says. The good news? Bangs only take a few weeks to grow out, since "too short" is usually just one-fourth of an inch.

SEE NEXT PAGE: When Bangs Go Badly

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"It'll grow back." When you're brimming over with tears at the sight of a new head of hair you didn't ask for, that's the last thing a woman wants to hear. My first bad haircut was at age seven, and I can still recall bursting into tears in the back of my mom's minivan after shyly nodding that, yes, I liked my new bangs, to the stylist moments before. Decades later, and I still haven't learned the art of politely informing a stylist that I hate what she's done to me. When I wondered out loud how to fix a bad haircut, my coworkers had plenty to say. We've all had bad cuts over the years, so we had a hair stylist expert, Chris Petroff (he's done Jared Leto's hair, and we're all jealous of those locks), weigh in on when to speak up and what to say.