How to prepare for a colour consultation matters more than the hour at the bowl. The consultation is where the work begins, not the chair. By the time a guest is gowned, gloved, and at the bowl, the questions should already be answered. What we use, what we lift to, what we tone down, how we manage the grow-out. The hour before the colour goes on is the hour that decides whether the colour goes right.
The four things the chair needs to see in front of it
Across twenty-eight years of these conversations, we've found the consultation runs cleanly when a guest arrives with four things in hand. Hair history. Honest reference photos. A sense of what they wash with, and how often. And a window of time, ideally a few days clear, so the patch test can sit where it has to sit.
Each of those carries weight. None of them takes much preparation. Most of the work is just remembering, then telling us the truth.
Hair history, every box of it
Tell us everything. The boxed dye from the chemist three Christmases ago. The semi-permanent your friend put on at the kitchen sink. The toner you bought online in lockdown. The henna from a holiday. We aren't writing your school report; we're reading what is underneath the surface you walked in with.
Some at-home colours contain metal salts that don't behave well when an oxidative formula meets them. They can lift unpredictably, sometimes warm up, occasionally heat-react. That is why a strand test, not just a patch test, can be the right move on a head with a long box-dye past. Honesty here saves us the awkward moment at the basin, and it saves your hair.
Photos shot in daylight, not under a ringlight
Three to five reference images is the sweet spot. More than that and the picture in our head gets noisy. Less than that and we are guessing at the shade of caramel you've fallen for.
Pick photos shot in daylight by a window, not under a salon ringlight. Pick a model whose hair texture, density, and base are reasonably close to yours, because the same toner on fine ash-blonde reads very differently on coarse near-black. Pick images at the angles you actually see yourself in: front, side, and the back of the head if you can find one.
If the photo you've saved is a balayage, it is worth understanding what the technique is asking of the colourist and of your hair before you arrive. We've written about that in the balayage primer, which is the closest companion piece to this one.
The patch test sits forty-eight hours ahead of the appointment
The patch test isn't a formality. Every UK colour brand we work with stipulates a skin test before an oxidative formula goes on, and our salon insurance asks for it too. We apply it forty-eight hours ahead, behind the ear or at the crook of the elbow, both areas the skin reads sensitively.
A fresh test is needed if it has been more than twelve months since your last colour with us, if a brand or formula has changed in between, or if anything in your medical history has shifted. Pregnancy, menopause, a new medication, a recent black henna tattoo (the cheap holiday kind, which can contain illegally high levels of PPD): all reasons to re-test. We would rather test twice and proceed with confidence than skip the step and meet a reaction at the basin.
The one thing guests bring that always slows the room down
AI-generated reference photos. They've started arriving in screenshots, and they're a quiet problem. The hair in them is impossible. Light falls in two directions at once. Roots transition where roots cannot transition. The density is fifty percent thicker than physics allows, and the shine sits like glass on the canopy.
We aren't snobs about Pinterest. We love a good Pinterest board. We just need the images to be photographs of real heads, ideally with the stylist or the source credited underneath. Otherwise we are pricing a job that can't be done on a real person, and the result on your hair will quietly disappoint you against a benchmark that was never real to begin with.
How to arrive, what to wear, what to leave at home
Hair clean from a wash the day before, dry, brushed through. No heavy product sitting on it. A button-down or zip-up top so we don't have to drag a polo neck over a freshly toned head at the end. Avoid white at the shoulders if a deep brunette is on the cards. The kettle is on as you sit down.
If the consultation is about how to grow a colour out cleanly rather than how to take a new one in, the conversation runs along slightly different lines. We've described that side of the work in the grow-out method piece.
Why we block it as its own appointment
The consultation runs around forty minutes. We block it on its own, not tacked onto the start of a colour day, because it deserves the time and the head it requires. The patch test goes on at the end of the conversation, the notes are written up while you are still in the room, and you go home with two days to think before the colour appointment proper.
The chair you only leave when the work is right.
All of this is by appointment, on Paisley Road West since 2020, and the door opens by request rather than by walk-in. When you are ready to begin, the appointment line is on the homepage, and the conversation starts there.