Wow. Let me just say "Wow"- in a bad way. It's been a little over a year since Tierra disintegrated my hair off, and I feel a real need to commemorate the incident. I had light brown hair down to my waist with "natural" full blonde highlights and I could not leave the house without getting a compliment. A week before Tierra, a hairdresser flagged me down on the ferry and said that "if" my hair was highlighted, it was the best work she'd ever seen. In a so-messed-up-I-still-can't-believe-it twist of fate, I decided to try Rumors in Langley. Tierra, were you drunk, still drunk, or high, or what? This girl understood close to zero of the English language. (She's white, and American, so don't misinterpret that statement) I had made the appointment with a note that I had long hair, because I do this highlighting thing a lot and I know that point matters for scheduling. Tierra decided to make the most of her time by simply foiling the top half of my head and taking another scheduled customer for a wash, cut and style while I sat with the bleach in my hair for nearly an hour before she even checked it. The whole time she was bragging about making her schedule really tight at work because it was her birthday week and was proud(?) to be double-booking and totally screwing both of her customers over. All of this was not a "mistake," it was intentional in her own repeatedly professed best interest, which she did not even remotely framed as apology. The other customer had to continually ask her to cut the sides of her hair, and Tierra repeatedly tweaked her hair and insisted she had done it. I saw everything- you didn't cut the sides. Eventually the customer gave up and left. I was thinking really hard about whether I had any friends in the area where I could take a shower, or seriously even use a kitchen sink, and was prepared to walk out with the foils and if only, if only... Then Tierra got around to un-foiling and washing my hair, which is about a third of what it was by volume. She ripped out huge chunks in a frenzied brushing, although I said I really would be happier doing it myself. She said the tangles and chunks falling out were because I hadn't had a haircut recently and the ends were messy. News flash, Tierra: I had my hair cut the day before! I left with a skunk stripe of blond on the top of my hair, which has since mostly broken off. Brushing my hair took like an hour instead of ten minutes because if I wasn't super gentle it would all just end up in a pile on the floor. That's not a full highlight, by the way, but I'm lucky to have any hair left, so this is the least of my complaints. The most hilarious part of this (if you're not me) is her interpretation of a "straight line" in cutting my bangs. I was almost in tears of frustration trying to explain this to her- straight across- like they're already cut but shorter... she gave me a zig-zag random chop fit. To be fair, there were probably technically 50 "straight lines" incorporated into what could have been accomplished by a three-year-old and an electric turkey-slicer. I'd say "bangs shmangs," they'll grow out, but she was cutting out pieces of my really long hair, not just the established line of bangs. It was so bad that my mom took pictures, and I had to go somewhere else the next day to try to fix it. Now the front quarter of all of my hair -way too much- is bangs, which I really, really, really do not want (with all due respect to Betty Paige and Uma Thrurman). I went to Toni and Guy, but they said my hair was too damaged and they could not in good conscious do anything to even out the skunk stripe. So, I'm looking forward to another seven years of growing my hair out. I'll be almost 40 by the time it's back to what it was when I made the terrible, irreversible mistake of letting this selfish, crazy chick with a hangover and an end-of the-world important birthday schedule get anywhere near me. Happy belated birthday, Tierra. I hate you every day when I wake up in the morning. read more
