UPDATE: Since my last review (below) 3 things have happened:
1. Britt sent me an offensive, error-riddled, insulting rant at 1:00am on a level of unprofessionalism the likes of which I have never seen. Write me; I'm happy to provide our email exchange.
2. A number of people have sent me yelp messages thanking me for posting my review, as they had curiously similar experiences and even told me in our discussion that they had been berated and insulted by the unprofessional and classless antics of Brit.
3. Britt inflates Fluff's rating via her friends and by berating or accusing disappointed clients of being fake to get Yelp to filter the review. It's just sleazy. She's proven my point. Do yourself a favor - if you prefer not to be insulted after a disconcerting experience, or don't want to leave with your hair smelling burned, save yourself the trouble. Go to Luxe or The Parlour.
*There are CLEARLY no fake accounts - surely nobody does that - my full name is Akilah, and everyone but my grandma calls me Kai. I travel on business and during my trips have been fortunate enough to visit REAL master stylists. You'll find in Brit's extremely unprofessional, shocking, and pathetic response several half-truths and outright lies (including a breach of record confidentiality). Decide for yourself; message me for details.
REVIEW:
I'd seen Britt before and decided I'd like her to be my regular stylist. I made another appointment, and when I called to confirm and see about coming in 15 minutes earlier, I was told that I'd already been schlepped onto someone else named Ashley. I'm pretty picky about who does my hair, so I wasn't really a big fan of the sudden change without warning or a phone call to confirm and see if this still worked - particularly because Britt was already well aware of my selectivity when it came to the quality of expertise with my hair. It was less than an hour before my appointment at this point, so I went ahead.
WHAT A HUGE MISTAKE. 1) Ashley admittedly didn't have the right brush to actually do a blow out, so what I got instead was having my hair brushed like a child brushes a barbie doll while she held a blowdryer up to the vicinity. How a stylist at what should be a top notch salon doesn't have the right tools, I'll never know. But she spent some time trying to find one of Britt's and fell short. 2) She couldn't maneuver a blowdryer. Again, that's Stylist 101. 3) I even tried asking her to straighten my hair out, but I got resistance. A stylist who can't take direction isn't a very good stylist. 4) She was curiously hesitant - as in, she didn't really know what she was doing or how to approach it - coming at it at weird angles, not being able to hold both a brush and a dryer at the same time. It was painfully clear she didn't have much technical practice with this. It was just awkward. Ugh, what a nightmare.
As a result, I didn't get a blowout, but a blowdry that I could have easily done at home. So naturally, the roots of my hair weren't all that straight. Everyone, including Britt, knows that the key to a blowout is the blowdry - the flat iron is only there to set it if need be, not to straighten it. But what did Ashley do? She turned up the heat to make up for her shoddy "blowout". I saw way too much smoke billowing from my hair, she used sections that were way too small to withstand that kind of heat, and...
NOW MY HAIR SMELLS BURNED. Literally, like burning hair.. My head is in a cloud of...for lack of a better word, burnt. Whenever the wind blows, I smell it even more, and it's disgusting. People around me can smell it off of me - it's literally making me nauseous.
I told Britt this as she rang me up, to no real response, and called her as I walked home to discuss in further detail since she didn't care the first time. She insisted that Ashley was skilled (though she's only been doing hair for 3 years - go figure) and that her experience from getting tips from Ashley had suggested otherwise, in some backwards attempt to completely invalidate the experience she just watched me go through, as though I was just imagining it all. Ultimately her response aside from choosing to blindly defend her employee: "What do you want me to do about it?" And it wasn't in a We'd-love-to-make-this-right-here's-what-we-can-do kind of way.
This just in: you CAN'T boast on your website that you have nothing but the best of Denver's "master stylists" if you have someone in your employ who has been a stylist for 3 years. You just can't. She's a nice enough girl, but you can't be in the mood to chatter / relax when your hair is being burned.
I was looking for someone I could see on a weekly basis, and spend hundreds of dollars a month on between deep conditioners, blowouts, coloring, mani pedis, and keratin treatments. I'd even been in the stages of planning a ladies event for the members of a prominent LoDo organization of which I'm a founder. Unfortunately Fluff will not be that salon. read more