After all, there are many things that cause pain in the modern world. Being stuck behind a slow walking person, doing bikram yoga sunburnt, finding out that your long-term boyfriend got your flatmate pregnant. Yet, however painful these may seem, they pale in comparison to breaking up with a good hairdresser (crap ones don’t count) and so the song begins:

“It cuts both ways; our love is like a knife, it cuts both ways.”
 
The relationship between a hairdresser and client is a tenuous one. When it’s good, it’s a bond that can’t be broken. Friend, therapist, stylist, confidant; you move neighbourhoods when they do; you see them when they call; hell, you even change your colour for them. Yet one day, as you sit in the chair you’ve been sitting in forever, the shine seems to have dulled; the streaks of your breakdown are growing more and more apparent, like thick stripes smack down the middle of your scalp, separating you and them.

The person your hair used to love now feels like nothing but a constant split end as it becomes apparent you have reached the cutting edge.

So, what is the etiquette? Do you have to break up with them in person?  Is a text enough? Or, since it’s a service, is there any need to say anything? Or, can you simply cut and run…

Maybe Michael Bolton was singing, “… Hair can we be lovers if we can’t be friends…?”  to his stylist after looking in the mirror at his do? After all, someone who would let a man with a receding hairline sport a mullet is no friend.

“It’s a very awkward situation indeed,” explains Australia’s leading hairdresser, Brad Ngada, when Savvy talked to him on the subject of hair loss, aka loosing your hairdresser.

“My rule would be, if you have your hairdresser’s cell number – they are not just a hairdresser but a friend and hence deserve to be told you are leaving them.” 

Which is why sometimes it’s necessary to have a social etiquette on what is to be done in the situation.

Maybe someone should set up a web site (perhaps hairtohelp.com?) for victims of hair loss…

“It’s a form of delusional love based on the dynamic of servant and master,” says Ann Holland from Relationships Australia when asked for some advice on how to break up with your hairdresser. 

“People get caught up thinking their money buys real love and commitment, and it just does not,” she says. “Both parties should accept it’s a service. It’s delusional to think otherwise. You pay them to care!”

Yet, it’s not always that simple; some clients pay the price socially for years to come.

“I was with my hairdresser for years, and then I started getting a blow dry somewhere else,” says my best friend, Camille (who suffers from a blow dry addiction based on the amount of times a week she visits her hairdresser).  “It was so good that I couldn’t stop. When I saw him at a nightclub and my ex was all like, ‘who is doing your hair now?’, it was really intense.”

“Complacency is the main reason someone leaves a hairdresser,” says Ngata. “The client has been happy for year, but the hairdresser does not realise things need to change.”

So when is cheating, cheating? Or more importantly, is it cheating?

“It starts with a blow dry… what’s next? A colour and a semi?” asks Brad.

But sometimes you just need to cut your losses.

When I was 23, my hair fell in love with a hairdresser I now refer to as Lucifer. It was just after a break-up with a boyfriend, and I was looking for the inaugural Sliding Doors-esque dramatic change haircut.

The long and the short of it is Lucifer took me from Anne of Green Gables to Ms Beckham. Like a goon, I’d sit listening to his stories, hopes, fears, love of ice (not the type that goes in the fridge) and in between this, he’d cut my hair. If you get the feeling that I’m not talking during these interludes, it was because he never drew breath. EVER.

Still, I loved what he did for my hair.  One day, a few years later, I met up with a friend who now also got her hair cut with him when they said the sentence that made my hair stand on end…. 

“Lucifer says that you talk too much.”

I was outraged. I dumped him by never going back. But as much as I hated what he had said, I needed my hair done and nobody touched my hair quite like his ice rage.

It took me months of bad experiences until I finally met the likes of Nagata.

If this is you, we have some advice: Don’t colour on the first date! Like me, you could end up looking like a cast member from Circus Du Soleil.  

“Don’t colour on the first date,” says Brad. “I can’t tell you how many casualties we have had in here from people who have broken up with their hairdresser and jumped straight into the basin with a butcher!”

Indeed, if the first cut is the deepest, bad colour is salt to the wound.
 
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Break Up or Break Down?
Brad Ngata’s Navigation

When are you cheating on your hairdresser?
You let another person blow(dry) you.

How do you know it’s over with your hairdresser?
You find yourself getting a haircut, and the person cutting your hair isn’t them!

Should what goes on tour stay on tour?
It should, but it never does…