What happens if I hate my haircut?

If you hate your haircut, tell the salon within a few days and most will put it right for free. A good salon would much rather fix it than have you walking around miserable about your hair. Here is exactly what to do, what counts as fixable, and what to expect when you call us.

The short version

- Tell the salon within a week. The sooner you call, the easier the fix.

- Most salons offer a free redo or adjustment if you are unhappy.

- A redo means re-cutting or restyling. It does not mean a refund by default.

- Colour and shape can usually be adjusted. Length that is too short needs time.

- Be specific about what is wrong. Photos help more than feelings.

If you hate your haircut, call the salon first

The single biggest thing you can do is ring the salon quickly. Most salons, including ours, have a window where they will happily adjust or redo a cut at no charge. That window is usually somewhere between a few days and two weeks. Leave it a month and the conversation gets harder, because your hair has grown and nobody can tell what was done on the day.

You do not need to rehearse a speech. Phone, say you are not happy with your cut, and ask to come back in. You will not be the first person to do it and you will not be treated like a nuisance. We would genuinely rather know than have you tell ten friends instead of us.

What counts as a fixable haircut

Plenty of things can be sorted in ten minutes. Uneven ends, a fringe sitting wrong, layers that need blending, too much weight left in, a shape that was not what you agreed. These are normal adjustments and any decent stylist will do them without fuss.

Some things are not the stylist getting it wrong, they are hair settling in. A cut almost always looks different once you have washed and styled it yourself at home. If your worry is on day one before you have touched it, wash it first. Your hair behaves very differently when it is not full of salon product and someone else has not blow dried it.

And sometimes a short cut reveals thinning or breakage you did not notice under length. If that is what is bothering you, it is worth a proper conversation, and worth checking with the NHS if it is sudden or patchy, because that is not something a redo can fix.

What a redo actually looks like

A redo is not a fresh appointment from scratch with unlimited changes. It is the stylist correcting the specific thing that went wrong. If your layers are too heavy, they thin them. If one side is longer, they even it. If the fringe is too short, they cannot make it longer, but they can soften how it sits.

A redo is usually free. A refund is a separate thing and it depends on the salon. Most salons will not simply hand money back for a cut, because the time and skill were still used, but they will keep working until you are happy or offer a credit. Ask what the policy is rather than assuming the worst.

When it is just too short

This is the hard one, and I will be straight with you. No stylist can add length back. If you asked for two inches off and feel like you lost six, that is a conversation worth having about what happened on the day, but the honest answer on length is time. Hair grows a little over a centimetre a month on average, so a cut you are unhappy with is weeks, not years.

In the meantime we can change the shape so it grows out better, suggest styling that makes it feel less drastic, and book you a tidy up at exactly the right point so it never looks grown out and messy. A bad short cut and a deliberate short cut can look like two completely different haircuts with a bit of shaping.

How we handle it at the salon

Our team, Ashleigh, Keira, Sabrina and Shree, all work on the same principle. If you are not happy, come back. We would rather spend twenty minutes fixing a fringe than lose you over something we could have sorted on the spot. Cuts here run £42 to £55, and a follow up adjustment on a recent cut does not cost you again.

Call us on 01582 730381 or book online, and tell us it is a follow up on a recent cut so we leave the right amount of time for you. We are at Shop 660, Jansel House, Hitchin Road, Stopsley, Luton LU2 7XH. No drama and no awkwardness, we just want your hair right.