Day 148 - Hair Makeover! Goodbye Lion's Mane!
/My Pixie Cut
Before we left New Jersey, I decided to get a pixie hair cut. It was a pretty bold move since I have crazy curly hair, and as a kid whenever I got a pixie cut I suffered the upward vertical growing hair (not unlike Marge Simpson) as my hair slowly curled and grew until it was long enough to respond to gravity!
I figured though, these days with mousse I should be able to get my crazy curls under control. I went to the one hair dresser in New York City that I knew could pull off the cut I wanted. He did a great job and I was ecstatic with my pixie cut. It was easy to wash and manage for many months during our big adventure.
Alas, however, the curls began to go crazy and do whatever they wanted. Thank goodness for mousse or I would have been walking around with a Marge Simpson hair style in the streets of Spain. I considered getting a straightening treatment in Spain, but it was much too expensive in Barcelona and I didn't really see a hair salon in the tiny village of Riogordo.
Fast forward to Vietnam, and there happened to be a hair salon right next to our apartment called Le Salon. I thought with service prices so low (manicure and pedicure $4, etc), I might be able to find a good price if I could communicate properly what I wanted. Turned out the owner of the salon spoke pretty good English, and yes she could do the Keratin treatment for me for $80 (they ended up giving me a discount at the end so it actually came out to $75)! I have never paid less than $250 in the States for a good Keratin treatment (not the cheap kind that doesn't last), so I returned the next day for my appointment.
The salon was more or less empty except for 1 other lady who stopped by for a haircut. I had 2 people working on my hair the whole time! In some way I felt like Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games) with her stylists from the Capitol (get it? Hanoi is the Capital of Vietnam!). Haha...sorry I found it pretty amusing at the time.
I have no idea what method they used because it is not like any keratin treatment I have ever had. There were so many different steps and the whole process took about 5 hours!!! Granted I did ask for a hair cut too, which was done by a different stylist, because my straightened pixie cut looked very 80's. You know those ladies in Jane Fonda's aerobic videos? Yah I could have auditioned for those!! The hair cut cost me $12! I have never ever ever gotten a hair cut that cheap...even with using Groupon and Living Social deals!
My stylists were really great. The girl, Nhung, spoke enough English for us to understand each other, more or less. They even taught me some Vietnamese words and how to pronounce them properly. Vietnamese is really hard!!! They were funny and entertaining and really knew what they were doing, but they had never seen such curly hair...and so much of it on one person's head! I totally felt for them. My hair can be really difficult to manage but they did it and I am so happy with the results.
Hurray for my Vietnamese stylists and my now very very easily manageable hair!
What do ya think?!