HairdressingBy the minutes it is booked at and the stages inside it
One company, two jobs — choose which leads
Front of houseChairs, basins and the side room at Aylesham Back officeAnother salon diary, held from the same buildingWhat happens in the time, cut by cut
To you, and described as process and duration. Nothing on this page says how your hair will look afterwards, because that is not something a website can know.
Every piece of work below is booked at a length, and the length is the honest one rather than the flattering one. A chair that is handed over late once runs late all day.
Cutting and finishing
A cut and finish on dry hair is forty-five minutes: a few minutes at the chair agreeing what is coming off, the cut itself, then the dry and finish. After a wash it is an hour, the extra quarter going to the basin and the time it takes to get wet hair to a state you can cut accurately. A restyle is seventy-five minutes and the difference is at the front, not the back: the conversation before the first cut is longer, and the comb goes through the hair dry before anything is decided. A fringe trim on its own is fifteen minutes at the chair, no basin. A blow dry is thirty-five, or forty-five where hair is long or dense enough that drying it is most of the work.
Colour, and the time it spends developing
A single-process root colour is an hour and a half. About thirty-five of those minutes are processing: you sit in chair three under the extractor and nothing is being done to you, which is the point in the appointment when a magazine is useful. A full head of colour is two hours and a quarter. Half a head of highlights is two hours, a full head two hours and three quarters, and the extra time is almost entirely in the sectioning. A toner over a colour that is already there is forty minutes.
The skin test, and why it is a separate appointment
Before any colour appointment that is your first here, a skin test is booked as its own ten-minute slot, at least forty-eight hours in front. It is short, it is dull, and it cannot be done on the same day as the colour. If you ring on a Saturday wanting colour on the Tuesday, that works. Ringing on a Tuesday wanting colour the same afternoon does not, and the person on the phone will say so.
Turning those lengths into diary columns
Owner to owner now. The same list, read as a scheduling problem rather than as a menu.
When we take on your diary, the first document we need is the service list with your own minutes beside each line, because the minutes are the only thing that determines whether a day fits. We do not substitute ours. If your toner is thirty minutes and ours is forty, your diary gets thirty.
Three columns in that sheet matter more than the rest. The first is the booked length. The second is the processing window inside it, if there is one: the thirty-five minutes in the middle of a root colour during which the chair is occupied and the stylist is not. The third is the turnaround you want left after each client, which is the number most owners under-set; it is the sweeping, the gown, the basin and the two minutes at reception.
With those three, doubling up becomes a rule instead of a judgement. We will overlap a second client into a processing window only where your sheet says that service may be overlapped, and only onto a chair your sheet says is free to take it. Nobody at the desk decides on the day that your colourist can squeeze one more in.
The arithmetic on the front page is the crude version of this: opening to closing, divided by appointment plus turnaround, times chairs. Run it on your own figures with the utilisation sheet, and the weekly desk side of it on the load sheet.
The booked lengths in one tableMinutes, as the diary holds them
| Work | Booked at | Of which processing |
|---|---|---|
| Cut and finish, dry | 45 minutes | none |
| Cut and finish after a wash | 60 minutes | none |
| Restyle | 75 minutes | none |
| Fringe trim | 15 minutes | none |
| Blow dry | 35 or 45 minutes | none |
| Root colour, single process | 90 minutes | about 35 minutes |
| Full head colour | 135 minutes | about 40 minutes |
| Highlights, half head | 120 minutes | about 30 minutes |
| Highlights, full head | 165 minutes | about 35 minutes |
| Toner over existing colour | 40 minutes | about 15 minutes |
| Skin test | 10 minutes | booked 48 hours ahead |
One note on the table. These are lengths of appointments, not descriptions of results, and they are not prices. Hair that is longer, denser or already coloured changes which line you are booked on, and that is settled at the chair in the first few minutes, out loud, before anything starts.