Lisa Proctor

You do not need haircut vocabulary. You need experience vocabulary.

A lot of people walk into a salon feeling like they are supposed to know the answer before the consultation even starts.

How many inches? What kind of layers? What angle? What shape? What technique?

But if you already knew exactly how to engineer the haircut, you would not need a professional consultation.

Your job is to tell me what you experience. My job is to translate that into mechanics.

Start With “What Isn’t Working?”

This is one of my favorite consultation questions because it gets us out of solution-guessing and into something much more useful.

• Where does it feel too heavy?
• Where does it go flat?
• Where does it puff out?
• What feels too long—or only acts too long?
• What section will not lie correctly?
• What do you have to fight every morning?
• What did you like in the salon but dislike once you washed it yourself?

Those answers are specific even if you cannot name a single haircutting technique.

“Take Off an Inch” Is Not Always the Question You Mean to Answer

People are often asked, “How much do you want off?” as if length is the whole haircut.

But someone may say “an inch” because they are trying to solve:

• bulk around the sides,
• a perimeter that feels too solid,
• bangs that are bothering their eyes,
• layers that have lost movement,
• or simply the feeling that the shape has gotten away from them.

The inch is a proposed solution. The discomfort is the actual information.

Use Comparisons You Can Actually Feel

You do not have to measure perfectly. Comparisons are often more useful.

“My bangs are a little too long, not a lot too long.”

“I like the length, but this area feels too bulky.”

“I want movement here, but I do not want the bottom to look thin.”

“This side behaves. This side does not.”

That is excellent consultation language.

Show the Stylist What You Touch When It Annoys You

People communicate with their hands before they find the technical words.

If you keep lifting the same section, pushing one side behind your ear, pulling at the perimeter, separating your bangs or fluffing the crown, show that.

The gesture is data.

A good consultation pays attention to what you are demonstrating, not only to the haircut name you happened to find on Pinterest.

Bring Pictures—but Use Them as Clues

Photos are useful because they help reveal what catches your eye: softness, movement, fullness, length, shape, polish, fringe, texture.

But the useful conversation is not only “Can you make me look like this picture?”

It is:

“What do you like about this? The length? The movement? The way it sits around the face? The fullness at the bottom? The fact that it does not look over-styled?”

Now the picture becomes information rather than a demand that your hair duplicate somebody else’s density, texture and growth pattern.

A Simple Consultation Formula

What bothers me → Where it happens → When it happens → What I do not want to maintain → What I still want to keep

For example:

“The sides feel too bulky after I wash it, but I like the overall length. The top goes flat unless I spend a lot of time blow-drying it, and I do not want a haircut that requires that much work.”

That gives a stylist far more to work with than “I guess take off an inch and add layers.”

You Are Allowed to Know the Feeling Without Knowing the Cause

This is the principle underneath my consultation style:

You are the authority on your experience. You do not have to be the authority on its cause.

That is not vague. It is actually a cleaner division of labor.

You tell me what is happening in your real life. I bring the professional mechanics to the conversation.

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Next Useful Move

Before your next haircut, write down the three things you fight most often. Do not solve them. Just describe them.

General cosmetology education. A hands-on consultation may be needed to evaluate an individual haircut, texture, density and growth pattern.