Hair stylist

By LIANE VOISEY

Name: Terry Whaitiri

Age: 20

Job title: Hair stylist

Working hours: 47, but varies with demand

Employer(s): Servilles Mission Bay; hairdressing salons nationwide


Pay: Starting from $200 a week if you're a junior and up to $2000 a week as a top stylist. Some stylists are on a set wage, but most will be on minimum wage and gain a certain percentage of commission

Qualifications: National Certificate in Hairdressing, obtained through an NZQA-accredited one-year course or through an apprenticeship.

Career prospects: You can move on from hairdressing, perhaps expand your skills to do makeup work or photography. There are freelance opportunities to work for magazines, TV or film, or work overseas.

Q. Describe what you do

A. I'm a hair stylist - I cut and colour hair at Servilles Mission Bay salon.

Once you're trained, building up a consistent clientele is going to take a good six months to a year. When you've learned the basic techniques and haircuts, you can let your creativity take over, too.

Q. Why did you choose hairdressing?

A. I just always wanted to do it. The other day I found an autobiography I did for primary school. It said that I was going to become rich and famous through hairdressing!

Q. What skills/qualities do you need to succeed?

A.You needs lots of creativity and to be open to new ideas and learning new things. There's always new techniques or styles that you have to be open to so you can continue progressing.

Q. What's the best part of what you do?

A. Just being creative and trying different things. With every client that comes in you're never doing the same thing and it's great when clients get excited about what you've done.

Q. What's the worst part?

A. It's when things don't go according to plan. Sometimes you have a bad day and you stuff up a colour or something like that, even though it's easy enough to fix. You cut yourself sometimes with the scissors, but I just chuck a plaster on it and get on with it.

Q. What's the proportion of men/women?

A. There's more men entering the profession, but more women are coming in too. About one in 10 hair stylists are men.

Q. Any memorable moments?

A. I entered a photograph of my work for the L'Oreal Professionnel Colour Trophy Awards and came away with the Young Colourist Award. Anyone entering this had to have been hairdressing for less than five years. On the judging day we all had to recreate the look on the same model using the same colours and outfit. I was quite shocked to have won, but it was good because there were four of us from our salon competing on that day.

Q. Any unusual client requests?

A. Quite often you have clients come in and they'll say that they don't know what they want, or they say what they want and then what they don't want, but kind of countradict themselves. I had someone the other day who said they wanted their hair to stay really long, just a little bit of layering, but they wanted really short layers too.

Q. What are your career hopes?

A. Just to do really well. I enjoy doing competition work and show work. I've just done a national tour with Servilles and L'Oreal where we went to places like Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga, demonstrating the new hair ranges, colours, styles and collections. I'm also helping out backstage with L'Oreal at New Zealand Fashion Week. I really enjoy those types of things, it's a bit different from coming into work at the salon every day.

Servilles