| rev:text
| - I just got back from Avalon and am still stewing over my evening. My student stylist was great; the instructor was awful; and minor things about the facility and pricing were the icing on this 1 star cake.
A very close friend of mine is taking classes there. My mother had gotten her hair permed by her a few weeks prior, and it came out great - she only commented on how long it took (about 4 hours). Eh, it's a school. I booked myself for bleaching my roots and a cut, quoted $28 on the phone.
Let's reiterate before I go on: This is a school, so anything that happens to you is not the fault of the student. It is the fault of the instructor, who has to be consulted at every step and often helps with the applications. There is no reason for anything bad to happen to your hair, unless your student is saddled with a subpar instructor, like Melanie.
I arrived at 5:30 and no bleach was even applied until 6:30, because my friend (let's call her D) had to literally hunt down Melanie, and get approval.
This woman came over and started discussing my hair, which is platinum blonde. Upon explaining that a gold band in my hair was from D's previous attempt at bleaching with 20 vol, and telling her that my normal stylist uses 40 vol bleach left on for 40 minutes, I received an EXTREMELY condescending lecture (literally, baby talk style) on how "our students are only taught to work according to manufacturer directions" and they don't use past 20 vol. That's stupid, IMO, since they will encounter clients (like me!) who need a higher level than that. But whatever, I'm not that picky, so I told her to go ahead and try it.. mostly to shut her up.
THEN she starts lecturing me that due to something about the bleach taking, I need to do my roots every 3-4 weeks. Why yes, of course I do, of course I should give you money more often... what a load of bullshit. My normal girl never has a problem with 6-8 weeks of regrowth.
We finally get the bleach applied. Somehow when it was rinsed off, there was a small spot of dark left. I told D not to worry about it, A) because I didn't care and it wasn't noticeable when dry, and B) because I've had this happen before, and re-bleaching it does NOT fix it... but she said she "had to" because Melanie would make her. Sure enough, she did waste another hour on that. The whole time, she was extremely short and rude to D. No, it did not fix the spot.
In between every step, we had to wait 10 minutes for Melanie. Apparently instructors are only assigned to one row, yet she was constantly in the other rows, ignoring her own. Even upon someone fetching her, she kept repeating "I'll be right there" and walking past us to get to other students (again, not in her row even). This nonsense added 45 minutes to the total time.
Somewhere between the bleaching and toner, Melanie realized that she was being somewhere close to "evil" on the meanness scale, and turned into an utter kiss ass, being sickly sweet to both of us. This went on about half an hour... most of which was spent mixing a toner... which she then applied to my scalp, practically RIPPING my hair out with her strokes, and which also burned. Toner should not burn.
By now it's about 9:15. The school closes at 10. Melanie tells me "We're not going to have time for your haircut", then bends over and again in babytalk says "Would that be okay if you came back another day for a haircut?" I wanted to punch her. No, it's not okay. You booked me for a service, it took this long because YOU screwed up and kept vanishing, and I drove here from south Scottsdale. Also, you have 45 minutes, plenty of time. What the hell.
I made my displeasure plain and got my "haircut", but just told them to trim the longest layers, because she was huffy about the time, and I thought she'd probably morph into a vampire bat and latch onto my neck if I asked for an actual layered cut.
I finally go to pay and they announced it was $43. What happened to $28? They charged me for the TONER and for EXTRA PRODUCT. Who DOES that? Lightening generally involves toning, it all needs to be included in the price, and I shouldn't be charged for the "extra product" from a stylist's screwup. One of the girls did give me $6 off, but it was still annoying to be quoted $28, then nickel and dimed up to $43.
And if that wasn't enough Melanie for the day, she came over as I was paying to say "See, it's not as yellow as it was before." Gee, cute, trying to validate yourself that you actually didn't do a pretty terrible job on my hair.
Oh, and the facility gripes: this is apparently their new location and appears very haphazardly put together. The mirrors wobble constantly (I actually overheard some girls saying a wall of them had crashed down), half the sinks only run ice water, a couple were already broken, and there is only 1 bathroom for the probably 60 people in there at a time.
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