Apologies for those of you who are not in the USA as this is probably not applicable.
I wanted to share a great and cheap way to get beauty treatments such as haircuts. There are prestige schools / salons that train hair specialists with the best techniques and products. They generally accept clients for students to practice on. This is a really cool deal because you can get stuff done MUCH MUCH cheaper and the risk of turning out with a purple – weirdly cropped hairdo is mitigated since everything is supervised by the teacher who is a trained professional. So even if the student messes up, the teacher fixes it right away. I don’t know if I would risk with coloring, but for haircuts and such it can’t get better.
Today I went to the Baldwin Beauty School which has a really good reputation in Austin. My haircut was $12 (!!!!) for 2 hours of work: $7 for the cut and $5 for the styling. The end result looked quite good. I have never in my life paid so little for a haircut.
This reminds me of a story about an MBA classmate who wanted to be super cool and went to Bumble and Bumble salon in NYC, paid $100 for his haircut, and looked like a plucked chicken afterwards. I think what the only worse thing than that haircut were the endless jokes he had to endure afterwards.
Updated: So for the NYC dwellers among my readership, there is a good place in Manhattan called Salon Ishi on E. 55th street and Park. They have student trainees doing haircuts on Wednesdays, starting at 5pm with one week in advance appointment. Check it out!
Grobetrotter 