J'ai testé pour vous..une école de coiffure

I am leaving tomorrow for a week in the US to attend a trade show (and then my cousin's bachelorette party!), and pretty much every time at the last minute before a trade show, I think "Crap, I should get my hair done".  It's a bit of a cliché, but (most) (foreign) gentlemen do prefer blondes and the blonder my hair is, the more they like me.  I know, I know - it's sexist and not fair and blah blah blah, but as one of the few women in my industry, I've decided I'll take any leg up I can get.

I normally try to get my hair done in the US because I've never really been happy with my haircuts & colors here, but I read a French blog last week talking about all the various hair academies in Paris, and I thought, pourquoi pas?  I used to go to the Aveda Institute all the time in the US and I loved it - and I figured if my hair got messed up here, I could always get it fixed next week.

So I checked out this website, and chose Jean Louis David because 1) I had done a case study on them during my masters program and 2) I thought they were the "specialist of blondes" (but I actually now think it is Jacques Dessange).  It was a bit annoying to make a RDV because you either had to call a numéro payant or show up in person, but I got my appointment set up for this past Tuesday. 

I showed up and paid my 15€ (7€ for the cut, 8€ for the color), and got sent upstairs. I was fairly quickly assigned a student, and we went through their look book together, and I chose a photo of a women with golden highlights. She in turn showed me something like this:

And I was like "Um, no - that's what my hair looks like now. I am coming in to cover up the regrowth, not make it look like I haven't had highlights in six more months".  She called over the instructor, who said that this was a new style becoming popular in France, and that the student was here to learn it, but that she would do that first and then give me some highlights after.  So I sat there for and let her do here thing, not in any way convinced by what she was doing....and three hours later, she whirled me around and I looked pretty much exactly the same as I had earlier. Minus a few inches of hair. 

At that point, I was like "Do I say something or do I not say something?" I mean on one hand, it wasn't terrible at all and I had only paid 15€, but on the other hand, she was there to learn and it wasn't what I had asked for. In the end, when the instructor came over and asked what I thought, I decided to speak up and be honest and said "It's fine....but it's not at all what I wanted".  I thought she might say "Tough luck", but instead she replied "Sometimes hairstyles need to be washed a few times before you really see how they are - try it out for a few days, and if you don't like it, come back and we'll do it again for free".

So I left, and didn't end up liking it any more, so I made another appointment for today. This time, I ended up getting a personal consultation with the instructor, and she had her chouchou redo my hair, and it is a million times better.  Exactly what I was looking for and the equivalent of what I get in the US.  Unfortunately though her class pet was Spanish and lives in Madrid, so that's a little far to go for a haircut.... Though I guess going to the US is also far too. :D

Would I try it again?  Probably.  I'm never satisfied with hair cuts/colors here no matter how much I pay, so in the end, I figure why pay 200€ when I can pay 15€?   Though I would probably give another school a shot next time for comparison's sake.  Has anyone else tried a hair school here?