Lifestyle

Haircuts and Heartbreak: The Perilous Peluquería

Seven years go, I walked into a hair salon in Buenos Aires. What followed was the most traumatic two hours of my life.

At 14 years of age, my family decided they’d have enough of me and shipped me off to Argentina on a three month school exchange, where I would stay with a family. The language barrier was socially crippling and homesickness had all but made me a hermit. My host decided I needed a make over, so we started with the hair.

This is a friendly caution to the globe trotters out there without a firm grasp of the local lingo: Stay away from the hairdressers for as long as possible. Unless you are confident you can communicate exactly what you would like for your next follicular innovation, don’t risk it. It might just get lost in translation and Eduardo Scissorhands could start throwing jargon at you, lexis far beyond the reach of your humble pocket dictionary. He blinks back at you in the mirror, searching for your approval, and you do what every linguist has done at some point or another to avoid looking like an idiot: you respond with a “Sí!” and a smile. And so it begins. How bad could it be, you ask yourself. So I’d have to wear a hat for a week, hair grows back.

You soon realise you have made a terrible mistake. You start loosing your nerve as you’re pulled over to an armchair and wedged neck first into the ceramic alcove of the sink. The toe-curling head massage ensues as the shampoo-and-conditioning process comes to a head (pardon the pun). Eduardo attempts the usual “So you going anywhere nice today?” that accompanies the slightly awkward situation when a stranger washes your hair. All you can manage in response is a timid, terribly British, “I’m so sorry, I don’t speak much Spanish”. He looks unimpressed, this doesn’t bode well.

Soon, you’re back in the spinny leather chair and Eduardo is brandishing deadly, tweezers sized scissors.. You exhibit the five stages of grief as he begins to massacre your beloved locks. Shock is quickly followed by disbelief and anger. Don’t you DARE give me a fringe, I spent five years growing out that monstrosity!

Panic grips you and speech is replaced by shrieks of terror as the scissors get closer and closer to your ear. You have passed the point of no return and resolve to simply shut your eyes rather than witness the horror. Eduardo continues to hack at your hair in silence as you sit there, helpless. Images of your bare scalp flash across your mind, didn’t they say baldness was genetic? Soon, the reassuring warmth of the hair-dryer greets you and the massacre is finally over. When the towel was finally ripped from my neck, I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. And then, before he could chop off any more, I ran.

I escaped with my hair, albeit considerably less of it. My parting had shifted further than the San Andreas Fault line, and I now had thick, bouncy layers of hair that appeared to move independently of my head. Perhaps this explains why models in shampoo adverts are endlessly swishing their hair.

So there you have it. Two of the most terrifying hours of my life spent in a South-American beauty salon. I was lucky this time. Then of course, there was the time in Madrid where I ended up with electric blue hair, but that’s a story for another time…

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