Becky W.
Yelp
Hairstylist: Toma
Results: color turned out great and looks pretty even
Experience: so very painful and traumatizing
Next day edit:
The store manager Mike called to apologize for the experience I had and reassured to me that this would be a learned experience for them.
He explained that Toma was a new stylist and that they would take action to help prevent this from happening again. I appreciate the effort to reach out and the reassurance.
I don't want my poor experience with a new stylist to completely affect their 10+ years of great service (which shows in the color result), so just for Yelp's sake I've added a star.
My advice for first time customers is to make sure to ask for a *specific* stylist who has great reviews here.
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Details below if necessary:
I would like to preface that I've had my hair bleached+colored the same area and the same amount of hair back in 2017/2018 with someone else in flushing, NY and just bleach with another salon in flushing, NY. So I know what it's like to have my hair bleached down to the roots.
But this time, having my hair bleached the same way here was one of the most painful experiences I've had in my sheltered life. My head was burning and in so much pain I sat there holding myself, sweating, eyes closed trying to will the pain away.
Now that I've painted the picture of how I felt, I'll try to detail the difference I noticed between this bleaching experience and past bleach jobs, while debunking some possible reasons that made this experience so much more painful.
Another worker there noticed how much pain I was in. He mentioned that perhaps my scalp was too clean and that's why it burned more than usual. - Fair. I always wash my hair the night before. In saying that, that means I also washed my hair the night before for my other past bleach jobs. So I don't think that would cause the amount of pain I felt this time around.
When bleaching my hair, she took globs of bleach, slapped it on my roots directly and then brushed it down my hair. Doing this, left heavy globs of bleach still sitting on my scalp. - So thick globs of bleach was bursting out of the aluminum foil wrap, smearing off my sideburns and onto my face (I was given a towel to keep wiping it off my face while waiting for it to be washed off).
After the first (out of 2) round of bleaching, another worker walking by who noticed my wincing face, mentioned that perhaps they should massage oil on my scalp. But by then, my hairstylist already started applying the second round of bleach to my scalp. - She still didn't attempt to apply anything to help the growing burning pain (if there was anything that could be applied to help). To be fair, she did start to massage my scalp while it was in its second step of bleaching to help clear some of the bleach around my roots, but there were so much of it, it didn't clean up much bleach off my head.
Now onto the coloring stage.
From my experience (myself -when I did at-home touch ups- and other salons), would used Vaseline around my ears, neck, face bordering my hairline to keep it from staining.
So it was strange to see this stylist go right into coloring without it. When another worker noticed the staining, she asked about it, but my stylist reassured her that she was going to clean it up with another color removing solution. - Which she did, but my ears and ear piercing was still stained (you can only spend so much time and effort to try and rub out the color from all that crevice.
As a result:
The colorist did good work. The color looks great. My hair feels very soft.
BUT my scalp (post 9 hours) feels so raw and dry. I can't turn my head because that area (where my head meets my neck) lost so much elasticity.
No noticeable redness (currently my scalp is too blue to tell) or blistering.