You're supposed to subtly check a stylist's hair before making an appointment in their salon.
If you walk past the window, take a quick peek, and see they all have greasy hair scraped up into scrunchies then you'll simply keep on walking and find a salon where they have ludicrous, bouncy orange hair. Well, the latter is my idea of a good look but, whatever your own tastes might be, the rule is always to check the hair on the stylists' heads. If they can't take pride in their own noggins, how can you trust them with yours?
The hair of the young apprentices in Do or Dye (BBC1) was lovely, but it's the hair on their eyelids and brows which was troubling. Most of the girls, and one of the boys, had brows which looked as though they'd been stencilled on with a bingo pen, then covered in a glaze to fix them - black, alien and stark - for all eternity.
And there were absurd false eyelashes. Heavy lashes have always been important in the history of beauty. Marilyn Monroe's make-up artist, Whitey, used to draw a short grey pencil line at the far corner of each of her eyes which pointed downwards. In photographs these little lines created the illusion that a shadow was being cast by the weight of her luscious lashes. That's how crucial eyelashes are: the ultimate sex goddess would have grey lines sketched onto her face to enhance them. But the girls in Do or Dye have taken it to a comic extreme. Their bright, young faces were weighed down by a feathery strip of lashes which just looked odd.
Maybe it's a silly make-up routine they'll grow out of. When I was 15 I used to fill in my brows with black mascara and make my face seem pale and interesting by rejecting beige face powder in favour of white talcum.
So perhaps the girls, and boy, will look back one day and cringe at their mad make-up experiments. I certainly do with mine, but at least my Johnsons' Baby-caked face wasn't televised.
Based on their strangely painted faces, and their Betty Boop mannerisms of dipping and bobbing and giggling at everything, I would not choose these stylists to do my hair. I'd look in the window and just keep on walking.
But then we were taken to the Assistants' Show where the apprentices created hair styles and glamorous looks for the catwalk. It was here that the young people threw off their silly bubblegum behaviour. They stopped giggling and saying things like 'you're literally screwed' and they got to work and, oh, how good they were! Glitter, spray, curlers and crimpers and thousands upon thousands of safety pins were used to create insane, brilliant and outlandish looks.
Their tutors had talked of their creativity, but I had just seen lots of little teenage clone-gals who were mildly irritating, but then the catwalk show allowed each of them to blossom and I was shut up.
They may have all had similar eyebrows and lashes and had equally weird names, being called things like Angel, Elijah and Austin, all of which reminded me of the primary school which had two girls in one class called Unique, but when they rolled their sleeves up and got to work they were just splendid and delightful to watch.
It was nice to see young people enjoying their job, being hopeful and excited, and making a career in something so wildly glamorous. However, there was a hint that the game isn't quite as glam as it seems, with one manager telling her little charges, 'unless you're bleeding from every orifice you can't call in sick.' With that statement, the posh salon transformed into the bleak call centre.
Do or Dye was a nice little documentary but I didn't really see the point of it. Have we simply run out of documentaries about police and paramedics and so we're turning to hairdressers? Also, recent documentaries on screen have been about the Holocaust, and this week sees one about the alleged paedophilia of Lewis Carroll and another about the suicide of Aaron Swartz which left me shivery and tearful. In the wake of these, Do or Dye seemed a bit silly, but it's about hair and glitter and giggles, so what else could we expect?
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