Forty-One Photographs

Jeanette sat down, handed me her phone, and said she wanted something completely different.

There was an album open on the screen. She'd been collecting.

I scrolled.

Photograph one: a shoulder-length layered cut, side part, soft bend at the ends.

Photograph two: a shoulder-length layered cut, side part, soft bend at the ends.

Photographs three through forty-one: the same.

Forty-one screenshots, gathered over what she told me was almost a year of dedicated research, and every one of them was the haircut Jeanette was currently wearing. Which I knew intimately, because I had given it to her, and to be perfectly honest, I had given it to her better than most of the women in those pictures were getting it.

I kept scrolling. You keep scrolling. It buys you time.

"These are lovely," I said.

"I'm just so tired of what I have."

Now. You have two roads here.

Road one is to hold up the phone next to the mirror and let a grown woman discover in public that she has spent eleven months curating a museum exhibition of her own head. That road is very satisfying for about four seconds and then you have lost a client for life and deserved it.

Road two is to ask better questions.

So I asked what she didn't like. And she said it felt heavy. And I said where. And she touched the sides. And I asked what she did with it in the morning, and she showed me, and there it was — she'd been parting it on her heavy side for nine years because that's where her mother had parted it in 1987.

I took two inches off the length. I moved the part. I put in some long layers where she'd been carrying the weight and I sent her out the door with a round brush and instructions.

She stood up, looked in the mirror, put both hands on her face, and said, "It's completely different."

It was the same haircut. Two inches shorter, parted on the other side.

She told the entire congregation at First Methodist that I had reinvented her. A woman came in the following week and asked for "whatever you did to Jeanette."

Six weeks later Jeanette was back in my chair with forty-two photographs.

Same haircut.

Here's what I've decided about that, and I mean it kindly, because I've been on the other side of the chair too.

People don't want a different haircut. They want a different Tuesday.

I can only actually sell one of those. You would be amazed how often it's enough.