There you both are: your client in your chair with freshly washed hair and you with scissors in your hand and a riot of thoughts on your mind.

What in the world will you talk about? Will it be about her hair or a topic she brings up and you pick up? Will it be the thing that has been itching away at your mind for the past two sleepless nights? Will it be about the latest Hollywood meltdown or alien abduction theory?

Your mind races: so many possibilities and only forty-five minutes to explore one.

The year 2009 has certainly given all salon professionals lots to talk about. There has been a raft of celebrity scandals from the Enquirer hunting Tiger Woods to the weird deaths of Michael Jackson and David Carradine. Celebrities are groping each other on stage, opening their pie-holes to air out bizarre subjects, going to jail or rehab and acting like the little snots they were raised to be.

The economy has collapsed and sits rotting on the evening news. Stores have closed before we could get to the register with our below-cost treasures. Friends and family have lost jobs, gone through sudden divorces and been foreclosed on. Everyone is behind on taxes and bills and everyone has an opinion about bailout money and healthcare spending.

If we could fit it in between blow-dries and bang-trims, we could jabber on like golden-crested mynahs about anything and everything. After all, we actually read People and Us and have our own stories to tell.

But should we?

In years past, most stylists would ramble on about most everything public or personal. With the drone of the dryer as a background choir, some would do a free association soliloquy about, say, an arrest in college, a divorce or two, their thoughts on gay marriage and tattoos, the failed policies of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama, a considered sex change and history's weirdest serial killers. With the need to tighten up our professional posture and in a desire to increase our client retention, most stylists are reconsidering what constitutes appropriate subjects in the salon.

Let's face it: we need to increase our client satisfaction. We cannot afford to lose one single client because we broiled them in a blistering topic. The age of wacko conversation is done and done.

To assist the stylist to adopt new professional postures, your servant Raul has aggregated a list of appropriate and inappropriate topics for 2010.

Never discuss:

- How loaded you are at this exact moment
- Which politician is having what sex with which religious leader
- One's uncle's prison experiences
- Your decision about your rehab
- One's treatment progress with any type of rash or pustule
- One's experiences with alien abductions
- The precise date of the end of the world
- Adam Sandler or Keanu Reeves movies (particularly Punch Drunk Love and A Walk in the Clouds)
- What the voices in your head are saying
- Anything to do with your bowels or stomach problems

Feel free to talk about almost anything the client wants to talk about with exceptions (see list above).

Talk about their hair, its color and condition, their hobbies, their self-improvement regimes, vacations and kids (except little Billy and his probation problems), and their movies seen books read and music they are currently enjoying. Keep the focus on them and let them either talk away or relax in a delicious wash of silence.

Your author has been working on his own inability to discern true wit from inarticulate slather and quite enjoys being more professional in dress, demeanor and speech.

He shows up on time, talks with client and staff about the true purposes of our art and always keeps in mind the real reason why the client walked through his doors: to get beautiful hair and to feel good about it.

Article by: Raul for Capelli d'Oro ©2009

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