There comes a time in your life when you must train an Asian.

Despite your understandable misgivings, you have to volunteer your hair to be their beautician school, experiment and teacher simultaneously. My hair was last cut/trimmed about a year ago, and the dead ends have long been telling me it's long past time to get it cut. I knew I wouldn't be able to find someone who can do the Curly Cut like at home, but it didn't really occur to me what I was up against until I saw posts from other women in the expat community. Their main concerns and replied horror stories related to the Korean hair people's inability to color Western hair. They would apply the technique they use on Koreans, apparently, which starts with frying/bleaching hair to death since they're used to starting with pitch black, and then going from there.

But I started to really get an idea of what I was up against when one random day on the bus, I looked around and thought how sick I was seeing of bowl cuts on practically every male around.

And to be clear, the majority of men are actually older and look much more like this:

Anyway, there's precious little variety when it comes to default hairstyles here*, and it dawned on me as I looked at the 100000nth bowl cut: there's not much else to do with their hair. It's super fine, thin, silky as water, and probably one of the substances on earth most susceptible to gravity. So naturally they aren't going to spend as much time and effort styling it to giving it lots of body or lift. 

A girl with basically straight hair posted asking about where to go if you have curly/wavy hair. I of course didn't actually know her hair was straight until she posted a pic after the cut. She liked it, it looked good EVEN IF IT WASN'T CURLY, so I once again have to wonder wtf is wrong with women. They don't know what blonde is and probably half claim they have naturally curly or wavy hair, but their hair is like the girl with wavy hair here:

Come on!

My consolation is her hair looks good and she likes it, and everyone says this guy will not stop working until it looks like you want, just bring pics. I downloaded quite a few from every angle. Now I just need to figure out how to translate in Korean that I lose around 2-3" of length when my hair dries from when it's wet and pulled straight. It's another tricky part about my hair, that I can't just say, "Cut it to shoulder length," and they can do that. Nope, you've got to leave a few inches so when it curls up it's shoulder length. 

I just hope he doesn't throw his hands up in the air and say he can't do anything because it's so thick. Many hair dressers in the US would go on and on about how thick my hair was, particularly when they were thinking they were done and then saw more layers underneath, lol. 

Might post a pic afterward either way. Icks-nay on the hopes for it to go one way (MARK).

*NOTE: There is actually a surprising and, well, to me, alarming variety in women's hair colors and styles. How colors look with skin is just not a thing here, so you'll see quite a few reddish-heads and variations on blonde that just don't work. But this is the Shakira effect, where apparently no one is bothered by yellow hair on top and black eye brows- oh yeah, except in Chile where they're referred to as taxis. Lol. 

Understandably, lots of people here dye their hair to stand out. It is damned true that everyone here looks pretty much the same. (One time I was meeting my friend Laura at the train station. It was a bigger one, that spits you out into a crowded mall. Even with the exit number, until I got upstairs I thought, "How will I spot her?" Once there though it was ridiculously easy because she was the only Westerner, lol.) So coloring your hair and even sometimes perming it will make you stand out.

Until you realize as I have that 60% of women (men too!) color their hair, so now I can't really say how much they stand out.

Except for the platinum blondes. They're rare, and their hair is usually black on top/at the roots, so they look like they have striped hair. But THEY stand out.