A while back a client emailed me asking what she should book if she wanted no education during her appointment. None. No tutorials, no product breakdowns, no walking her through what I was doing and why. She wanted a hair appointment without small talk, without a lesson, without any of it. Just the service and some quiet.
It made me so happy.
Not because I want to stop teaching. Education is genuinely built into how I work. But because she asked. She told me what she wanted before she sat down, instead of sitting through something she didn’t want and hoping I’d pick up on it.
That is the entire point of the Experience Customization Form. And most people leave it blank.
The Question People Google at 11 p.m.
If you search some version of “how do I tell my hairdresser I don’t want to talk,” you will find forum thread after forum thread of people asking whether it’s rude. Whether they’d be a bad client. Whether there’s a polite script for it. Some of these threads run for pages.
The demand is real enough that a London salon made headlines specifically for letting clients opt out of small talk at booking. The owner’s reasoning was simple. Plenty of people love chatting at the hairdresser. Plenty of others just need time out, and asking for that should be okay.
Here’s what strikes me about all of it. Every one of those threads is someone trying to solve this problem alone, in advance, by finding the exact right sentence to say out loud in the chair.
Nobody should have to workshop a script to get a haircut.
How to Ask for a Hair Appointment Without Small Talk
At Wicked Hues, the answer is short. You type it into the form.
There’s no script to rehearse. No moment where you have to interrupt me. No worrying about whether it lands wrong or makes the next ninety minutes awkward. You fill out a field before you arrive, I read it before you arrive, and then we just do the thing you asked for.
Sitting in comfortable silence is a full service. You are not getting a lesser appointment. You’re getting the appointment you actually wanted.
I want to be specific about why the form matters more than saying it in person, because this is the part people underestimate. Saying it in the chair means saying it to someone’s face, at the moment you’re least comfortable, when you’ve already got a cape on. Saying it on a form means saying it on a Tuesday afternoon from your couch. Those are not the same ask.
What Else Goes on the Form
Small talk is one field. Here’s the rest of what people actually put in there, and what I do with it.
You want to learn something specific. The opposite request. Maybe you want to know how to curl your hair with a flat iron, or how to get your part to sit right. Tell me which thing and I’ll build time for it instead of guessing what would be useful to you.
You have music you actually want to hear. Someone once typed real band names into the “other” field under music preferences. That’s not a strange thing to do. That’s the best possible use of that field. Give me a few days and I’ll have a playlist ready before you walk in.
You want a hot tool ready. If the visit involves a specific tool, I can have it out and already heated when you sit down instead of pausing partway through.
You’re running low on something. I text the night before every appointment. That text is your cue to go look in your shower. If you’re almost out of your shampoo, tell me right then and I’ll set it aside so you actually leave with it. Most people remember at checkout, which is about ten minutes too late for me to go dig through stock.
Products and Reactions Deserve More Than Five Minutes
This one is worth its own section, because the timing genuinely changes the answer you get.
Say you tried something you saw online and you want to know whether it’s doing anything. If you ask me in the chair, I have about five minutes and whatever you tell me your hair did afterward. That’s a guess delivered with confidence. It is not research.
Give me a few days and I can pull the actual ingredient list, look at where things sit in the INCI order (the ingredient list on the back, which is the only part of the label that has to tell the truth), and give you an answer that holds up. Then we get on with the service you’re actually paying me for.
I have opinions about a lot of viral products. Some of them I’ve written up in full, like what coconut oil actually does to the hair shaft and why rice water keeps coming back despite the science. But the product you’re asking about might be one I haven’t looked at yet. Notice is what lets me look.
The same field is where I need to hear about any new allergic reactions.
If something has changed since your last visit, tell me. A reaction to a product at home, a new skin sensitivity, a reaction to something at another salon, a new medication that changed how your skin behaves. Any of it. I don’t need a diagnosis or a full explanation. I just need to know it happened.
Here’s why the timing matters as much as it does for products. If I already have a plan for your visit, that plan involves specific formulas going on your scalp and skin. Telling me the night before means I can double check every ingredient in everything I was planning to use, swap anything questionable, and patch test if that’s the right call. Telling me when you’re already in the chair means I’m making that decision fast, with a service half started.
Everything else on this list makes the appointment feel more like yours. This one keeps something off your skin that your body has already told you it doesn’t want.
There’s a Feedback Form You’ve Probably Never Opened
Most clients downloaded the client app once and have never opened it again. I know. It’s fine.
There’s an anonymous feedback form in there. Your name and contact information are both optional. Which means you can tell me my playlist options are bad without ever having to say that to my face.
And I will actually change them. If enough people tell me they want disco, or sad goth girl music, that becomes an option on the form. The whole reason the feedback form is anonymous is that useful feedback and comfortable feedback are usually not the same feedback.
A Blank Form Tells Me Nothing
I cannot read your mind. I’m working on it. Not there yet.
I can prepare for a reasonable number of scenarios before you arrive. I cannot prepare for all of them, and I would rather prepare for the right ones. Every field you fill in narrows that down.
None of this is a test. Leaving it blank is always allowed, and plenty of people do, and their appointments are fine. But the difference between a good appointment and one that feels built for you usually comes down to something someone typed into a box three days earlier.
This is also just how the salon was designed to work. When I wrote about returning to the roots of Wicked Hues, the whole idea was one client, one stylist, and an appointment shaped around the person in the chair. The forms are the mechanism. They’re how the shaping actually happens instead of staying a nice sentence on a website.
Your Next Appointment Is Yours to Shape
If you’re already a client: fill out the Experience Customization Form before you come in. Or email me. Or use the app. Whatever’s easiest. Just tell me before you’re sitting in the chair, because that’s when I can still do something with it.
If you’re not a client yet and you want a stylist who builds the appointment around what you actually want, start here. Fill out the form on the site, tell me what’s going on with your hair and what would make an appointment good for you, and I’ll email you back about getting in.
And if your question doesn’t fit neatly into a form field, just send it. I read those.
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