Salon image consultancy: why it is essential

Why in-salon image consulting is a vital step and how to understand the client’s desires and evaluate together the shapes and proportions of face and body.
Before even getting started with the hair washing, it is a good practice to engage in an image consultation with the client. This will allow the professional to understand the client’s desires and expectations, and relate them to the shapes and colors of her face and body proportions. It is also a great way to gather further informations about who we are talking to, their habits, interests, lifestyle in general, and not least how they consider their hair and how they approach self-care. All of this informations prove invaluable in fine tuning our subsequent professional proposal, and increasing our chances of fulfilling our client’s request.

Communication: the first step

Good communication is an important part of any self-respecting relationship, including that between a hairdresser and his clients. Knowing what her expectations are, what colors she feels enhance her most, and how she feels most comfortable are questions that can disclose valuable informations before proceeding.
Skipping this step means risking to perform a cut and color that are technically perfect, but not what the client wanted, or feels most confident with. This is a classic hairdresser faux pas, which can lead to the client leaving the salon for good and resort to another hairdressers.
Another great way to understand the client’s desires is to look at a lookbook or reference images together, showing the style, cut or color she would like to achieve.

Practice observing

Before having the client put on the protective cape, it is important to observe her as a whole, to get a sense of her overall style, her demeanor and thus her personality. It is also very important to observe the hair in order to understand the treatments it has undergone, its texture, thickness, growth side, etc. All this informations must be taken into account when we propose a treatment or hair intervention to the client.

Clarity is fundamental

Once all this information has been acquired, we enter into the operational part of the consultation: the proposal of the look. When we explain to the client what we think would be ideal for her hair and her proportions, let’s make sure that our words are not misunderstood: requests such as “lighten”, or “warm color” or “even cut” are too vague and may not have the same meaning for us as for the client.

Once the request has been clarified, the advice is to repeat one last time what we are going to do and the look that will be created. This will be useful to detect any last-minute misunderstandings and avoid disappointment for both the client and the hairdresser.

Last tip? Prepare a personal card for each customer, on which to note the requests and the looks or treatments carried out each time, so as not to lose track of the history of the individual customers, and to better understand their desires.

Do you want to know more about image consulting? Visit our Academy Insight and choose the most suitable course for you among our training offer!