I feel like I can give a fairly honest review as I did continue to be a customer of Rene's over a period of nearly more than 5 years, so had plenty of time to see him at his very best and his very worst.
I discovered him in the phone book when I did a home dye job that turned out to be a disaster. He knew exactly what to do & I felt confident in seeing him again.
Over the next few years we had a lot of hits and misses, but I attributed this to the fact that I have very long hair, it's harder for dye to take to etc.
However, in all the years I went there, he never charged me the same price twice---it was always in the same ball park , but I never knew what figure he would pull out of the air for any given appointment, though I always had the exact same procedures done. Considering I also gave him upwards of a 40% tip you think that just once he'd remember my first name, but he never bothered and not with my last name either. For a period of a bout a year he never returned my phone calls, it turned out his assistants didn't want to work ( He told me this himself) & they/s/he weren't delivering his calls, it took him over a year to figure this out, though I had myself had been seeing him 4 times a year.
He also has an antiquated computer system, which seems irrelevant but is not because every time we found a color I liked, they could never reproduce it again because it ( along with my name & personal) info could never be recovered again. The last time I saw him he started making excuses for this, but his Assistant called him out & told him point blank that the computer was a dinosaur & laughed out loud at him.
The last time I saw him, he kept me waiting FOREVER, my hair color turned out uneven. It was Deep dark brown, I wanted strawberry blonde, I had a picture of the color I wanted with me & my hair was blonde enough to do this, it wasn't like I wanted him to try to go from dark to light, it already was light enough AND if he had listened to me to begin with, it probably wouldn't have been so noticeable because the colors would've blended together better, but NO I ended up a brunette ( no offense to all you beautiful brunettes out there). And then when I commented on it in the chair , he made some lame excuse, tried to sell me shampoo adding insult to injury. The minute I got into my husband's car, he made me turn directly around to go back in there & make Rene fix it, which he did, but not the same day because I'd already been there for over three hours.
When I did go in for the following appt. he was extremely boorish and rude & acted like it was a total inconvenience, even though I'd paid this guy over a $130. He admitted that there was some pre-step he should've taken but didn't and that's why my hair turned out varying shades of brown and red. He made a couple of other rather rude remarks, like somehow it was my fault that the dye job went wrong , and then the straw that broke the camel's back was when he quite deliberately sprayed hair spray directly into my eyes, Thanks Rene, you're a true professional. read more