How to Tell Your Stylist You Don’t Love Your Hair—Without Making It Awkward

Your hairstylist flips the blow-dryer to “off” and unrolls the last round brush from your bangs. Pumping a drop of oil onto their hands, they rake it from the middle of your hair to the ends and pull off your cape with a giant grin on their face. They’re satisfied with the results of your appointment, but you certainly are not. 

Whether the result looks nothing like your inspo picture, the cut is way too short, the highlights are streaky, or (god forbid) all of the above, we’ve all fought back tears in the salon chair. Most likely, your first instinct is to smile through the pain, lie, and say you love it. But, that doesn’t help you or your stylist. Kindly and clearly expressing your disappointment to your stylist will not insult them—they want you to leave happy.

We’ve previously discussed when to communicate with your stylist and what tone to use, but now we’re going to teach you how to speak up when you aren’t happy with your look. The key is telling them exactly what you want to change and understanding where the miscommunication was; we reached out to three haircare professionals to teach you how to do just that. If the below phrases are what you want to say, the pros tell us what you should say instead, so the stylist can help correct the issue and you both leave the salon happy.

“I Wish It Was a Little Lighter.”

Instead of saying you wish your hair were a little lighter, hairstylists need to know where on your head you’re unhappy with the color. “Imagine your hair is black and white, like a black and white photo,” suggests Liz Haven, a hairstylist, educator, and co-founder of Kaleido Hair. The black represents the darker parts of your hair, and the white represents the lighter parts, or the highlights. If you can do this, you can point and tell your hair stylist exactly which “black” parts you wish were more “white.” 

The problem here is most likely porosity. Similar to how a dry sponge will absorb all the sink water, extremely dry or porous hair will absorb all the product. “Because of the porosity and how parched it was, when we introduced that toner, it brought it all in, making it appear darker than it actually is,” explains Haven. To fix this, you can ask your stylist for a clarifying treatment to strip some of the color, or you can embrace “toning for the fade,” like Haven suggests. Go home, wash it a couple of times, and let the toner naturally fade to a lighter shade.

“I Was Hoping My Hair Would Be Darker.”

In this scenario, it’s just as important to specify where on your head you’re not happy with the color; except this time, you need to point to which “white” spots you want to be more “black.” If you feel the entirety of the head is too light, it may be a very simple fix. “We just need to drop a level with the toner,” explains Lyanne Segui, a hair stylist at The Artist House. Hair color levels range from one (black) to ten (lightest blonde). So, if you express to your hair stylist that you would like to drop a toner level, it can take your hair from a level nine blonde to an eight, making the hair darker. The exact opposite of what you’d be asking for above! 

Aside from toner issues, it’s possible the highlighted pieces processed too quickly. “If the hair cuticle is more open than anticipated, that could lead the lightener to work more aggressively, which could lead to over-processing, or lightening of the hair to a level lighter than the goal,” explains Segui. The fix here would be the same—ask to drop a toner level!

“The Cut Doesn’t Feel Quite Right.”

Fingers crossed that when you say this to your hairstylist, you were hoping for something shorter than what you got. When it comes to the cut, nothing is more important than the initial consultation. Show, don’t tell, your hairstylist exactly where you want your hair to land. Is it the bottom of your chin? Your chest? Even the fanciest hairstyle lingo won’t save those inches that fell to the floor if you don’t make the cut you want clear from the get-go.

To avoid disappointment in a client’s cut and/or color, Ash Fortis, hair colorist and educator, and owner of XO Hair Lab, trains her team to help clients dissect their inspo photos, a huge component of the initial consultation. “A client will bring in a photo, and they may not understand exactly what they like about the photo,” she says. “Try to get the clients to say what parts of the picture they like.” 

If you’re looking for some hairstyle lingo to better express the cut you want, try weaving in terms like angles, layers, curtain bangs, blunt cut, or maximum movement. To really impress your hairstylist, get more specific by describing the type of layers you want. “The distance between the short, medium, and long layers is the distance that the shortest layer is from the perimeter of the hair,” explains Haven. If you want maximum volume and movement, you want to ask for shorter layers, but if you want more of a seamless blend and uniform length, ask for longer layers.

“It Looks a Bit Streaky.”

If your hair came out streaky, it’s a contrast issue and shouldn’t be too hard to fix. “It’s going to be a shift in how they [the stylists] place the dimension. Whether it’s a highlight or a lowlight, they placed it too dense or too thick, and the contrast is too stark,” says Haven. What you need to ask for—and you can use these exact words!— is a more seamless blend of the dimension. If you want to simplify it even more, go back to the black and white photo analogy and ask for more of a blurry gray instead of thick black and white lines. 

It’s also possible that instead of looking streaky, your hair came out too blended and appears almost one-dimensional—you want some of that streakiness back! Express to your stylist that you want more contrast in your hair. By asking for this, you’re telling your stylist you want to see a more defined difference between the highlights and the darker hair underneath.

“It Came Out Kind of Ashy.”

Nothing to change here, ashy is actually the perfect descriptor to use! Ashy describes a cool-toned blonde, meaning the hair has gray, blue, or even greenish undertones, and it’s a term commonly used among stylists. If this is the case, it’s another example of unwanted results because of high-porosity hair. Hair stylists try to account for porosity, or dryness, before applying color, but there’s only so much they can control when it comes to the speed at which your hair lifts during the lightening process. 

“For us,” says Fortis, “the best thing would have been in the beginning to say ‘hey, I just want to let you know I’m not looking for ashy hair. I don’t want smoky.’” If the tone isn’t mentioned by the client in the initial consultation, the stylist should bring it up.