How Do I Keep Learning?

I have all these unanswered questions, and all these techniques I want to learn. I want to absorb as much as I can about hair.  But I don’t know how. It seems like you can’t learn anything without spending a lot of money in this industry – the knowledge is out there, but it’s metered out and more expensive than oil. I can’t afford to take extra classes, I’m already about $18,000 in debt in student loans to pay for hair school, and I am finding it difficult how I can’t…learn at the pace I want to learn at. If I could go at my own pace I would be an amazing stylist in one year. And I mean that not to boast, and not because I think I have ridiculous talent – but because I devote myself 110% to what I do. I live, breathe, and sweat what I do in life, and there isn’t one minute of one day that I’m not thinking about it. I don’t get burned out. I’m a shark, I do one thing, and one thing only, but I am very good at it: Learn. And it is really frustrating me how school keeps me going at a pace I feel handicaps me.

I don’t want to just try and try and figure out how to cut hair by myself and then have someone grade my efforts after I’m done. Even if I do progress that way, slowly, I can miss HUGE, basic, foundational things. Like how to properly control your shears, how to cut on the outstroke, all these techniques and bits of experience that people can go years without learning…

I am fantastically skilled at learning things, but only when I can learn the way I want to learn. I don’t do well in other systems. For example, I did beyond horrible in high school. But I learned to make my own guitar (from scratch), without knowing anything about making instruments, or woodworking. And I did so well because I was directing my own education. I was going at my own pace by my own means. Maybe I should find a way to get a bunch of my own mannequin heads and just practice my own stuff after school. The school said I can practice coloring mannequins, if I pay for the color, so they aren’t resistant to my wanting to learn more… it’s just that they have a certain way they need to run the school, and I don’t fit into rigid systems very well.

I am still unsure how I feel about all the secrecy in the industry. Nobody wants to share tips or advice (not without charging a healthy amount of money, anyway). I understand this from a business perspective, but I come from a world of photography and music and art – a world where it is a mark of good character to be a teacher, to share your knowledge and experience and advice with everyone as much as you can, for the betterment of the craft. I come from a world that loves the art and craft of a thing, more than making money.

Maybe that’s why photographers like Joe McNally are living comfortably, and hairdressers like Robert Cromeans are living lavishly. I think I want to be a teacher though. If you love what you do it is dishonest to sequester it away in your mind. If you love what you do it is only right and proper to share it, and all the knowledge you have about it, with everyone else who loves it as much as you. If you really love it, it doesn’t matter that you don’t make as much money sharing ideas and experience freely. And you can’t say that it’s an immature concept, the free exchange of the craft, because so many great artists and great people embrace and champion it as the center of their personal code of ethics.

I’m rambling now, aren’t I? Oh well. When I am an awesome hairdresser I will share my knowledge. For free. With everyone that wants to know. I will make my money by being a great hairdresser, not by holding secrets.

Ps. Here is the guitar I built. I know it has nothing to do with hair, but I’m proud of it! I named it Drippy.

(ignore the dates on some of the pictures, I built Drippy last december. Just used a cheap camera and didn’t set the date to document it – didn’t want to bring my nice camera into all that sawdust!)

Done Cycle One! And Off to NAHA!

I am DONE Cycle One! This week was crazy with theory and practical exams, and terrifying and it aalll went so fast. But now I’m done! And I’m off with my class to NAHA in Las Vegas for 4 days! Whoo!

I think I’ve adjusted reasonably well to the crazy environment that the college is. It probably sounds like I’m always having problems at school because I just like to complain a lot (sorry!), but school is absolutely fantastic, and despite the stress and rush, awesome fun. I can’t wait to go to Vegas! And when I get back I’m on the salon floor! No more classrooms for me! (For awhile, anyway)

So anyways, I don’t have anything to say really. Just wanted to brag about Vegas. I finished and handed in my project book (an assignment to make a book that basically just paraphrases all the things in the textbook). Here is my favorite page from my project book:

The Blues Brothers International Standard Chart

My Classroom and Samuel the Jesus Lookalike

Practical Exam: Color on a Female Model

Tomorrow is my first real practical exam on a person. Full color and some foils. I know I will get bad marks because my only model has some severely lightened hair from about 1.5 inches from the scalp to the ends, and much darker regrowth… So when they hold the ends up to the root to see if the color is uniform, there’s just no way it will be.

Oh well. At least I got a model. And I hope she shows up! I think I’m going to try putting a half level darker color in the nape, and weaving some of it up into the crest to blend, and then doing a tint-back on the rest to bring it back to her natural color (or as close to it as I can get).

She wants to be lighter but her hair is too damaged to lighten it, so I’m hoping the zonal colouring in the nape and lowlights in the occipital-to-crest area will add some depth and create a more natural look, without darkening the overall appearance of her hair.

I’m buying a lot of energy drinks tomorrow.

Air Forming Evaluation

I got 90% on my air forming evaluation this Friday! W00t!

We weren’t allowed to use irons, just the blow dryer and round brush. I used a medium round brush for more curl, and took horizontal partings progressing to vertical partings up and over the crown/apex.

It worked out great, my air forming is quite a bit better than it was. I think a lot of the trick to locking the curl in is to heat the hair up while you’re brushing it out from the head (which I do 2-3 times or more, both to dry and to heat the hair up), and then rolling it up to the scalp and blasting it with the blow dryer to add a little more head to the base and strand. Then switching to cool and cooling the whole thing down.

A lot of the girls just roll the hair up to the scalp and try to heat it up with the blow dryer then, and the curl never forms to the ends of the hair, it just makes a little volume at the base. If you’re rolling that much hair up, just blow drying the outside isn’t going to heat the ends up much when they’re rolled up under so much hair!

And the hair heats up better while it’s wet, because the water holds the heat and helps distribute it. Brush the hair out while air forming to dry and heat, then roll it up either just as the moisture is gone, or when 99% of the moisture is gone, and it will hold heat better when rolled up to the scalp, then blast it with more heat (just to heat it up evenly, not to dry it). Then remove the last 1% of moisture with the cold setting on the blow dryer, as you’re cooling the hair down. And really get the hair cool before you take it off the brush.

First Week at Hair School: Part Two

Well I’ve whined enough, I should talk about some of the cool things, because there are a lot of cool things there!

First off, our kit is wicked! (Although it should be for $2100!)

We got:

Babyliss blow dryer, flat iron, curling iron

Nice wooden round brushes (3 sizes)

Vent & pad brush

Color bowls & brushes (2)

The usual combs

Straight Razor

Clips

Apron

Cape

Straight shears and thinning shears in a pretty case: (The straight shears are Jaguar and the thinning shears are Dannyco)

 

Student Shears

Student Shears

The shears aren’t top of the line, but they’re not bottom of the line either. They’re perfectly usable student shears I think.

And we got a pretty decent quality leather satchel thinger with belt:

 

Student Satchel

And one massive pile of textbooks:

 

That's not even all of them. There's one missing.

The mannequin head in the picture isn’t the one we got in our kit, it’s a cheap one I bought to practice air forming on. The mannequin we got is actually very nice. I couldn’t find a good picture online, but trust me when I say it’s good. You know the fake Barbie dolls you can buy at the dollar store? That’s what the head I bought (pictured with the textbooks) looks like next to the Pivot Point mannequin. It also has scalps that snap on and off. Oh, and we got a guy head too. With a freaky long beard of hair that is most definitely head hair, not beard hair. He looks a bit like Jesus.

In addition to the two heads (male and female) we got 3 full “snap caps” of hair, and a partial hair snap cap.

The textbooks, while there are a hell of a lot of them (I definitely wasn’t expecting that), are actually very well done. Very current looking throughout, great printing (the pages don’t look or feel cheap), it’s written reasonably well. My only gripe is that while the textbooks are well written, the course structure bungles it up a bit – but as I’ve said in other posts, this is a new curriculum and unfortunately that means we’ll be working some bugs out as we go. And of course, it’s tailored to the types of people who are most likely to go into cosmetology: Women with previous hair experience. But it’s not like they can really alter things for the small percentage of us with no previous experience, so I’ll just have to do some serious catch up on my own time. (Hence my cheap mannequin head!)

Oh, and we also got a nylon roller duffel with the MC logo on it, which I will probably use.

All in all, I was skeptical of how good the kit would be when I enrolled, but I’m quite satisfied with it. The only things I’m likely to buy aftermarket are jaw clips, maybe a different size thinning shear, and of course gloves.

First Week at Hair School

And what a hectic week it was! Sunday the 6′th I moved into my new place (an hour’s drive away, took two trips to get my stuff there) and unpacked and crashed around 2 am. Up again at 7 am the next morning for school.

It is intense – Pivot Point completely redid the curriculum, so we have brand new everything, and not all of it is bug free yet. The first week was all about color, and had a massive amount of homework. I was up till midnight doing homework most of the week, no time to do anything else. Some of the homework didn’t line up right in the course – the teacher (and it’s not her fault, it’s the new course) would tell us to read this bit from the cosmetology book, and do that bit in the study guide. But the parts we read in the cosmetology book would be a bit ahead or behind of the actual subject we’d be grilled on in the study book. Fortunately that’s a minor thing that almost all of us noticed.