Time in the chair

Where these minutes come from the arithmetic

Each stretch of the hour carries two figures: the quickest it honestly takes and the longest. They are deliberately not averages, because an average quietly hides the long appointment, and the long one is exactly the one you would want warning about before you agree to a time.

Tick what is happening and the tool adds the low figures together and the high figures together. That is the entire calculation — no weighting, no allowance for how busy it is, no money figures of any kind. It makes no claims about what will happen to your hair, and it runs entirely inside your own browser. The real time depends on your own hair: how much of it there is, how long it is, how quickly colour takes on it. That gets settled with you in the first stretch of the appointment, not by a web page.

What is happening at yours the sum

Why the span is so wide honest variance

A forty-minute span on one line looks evasive. It is not. Hair varies more than almost anything else we could be asked to put a number against: two people asking for exactly the same thing can be half an hour apart, because one of them has twice as much hair as the other, or because one is growing out something that was done previously and the other is starting from scratch.

The same holds for the cut on its own. A strong growth pattern, a cowlick or a parting that refuses to move all get pointed out and worked with rather than fought, and working with one of them takes longer than ignoring it would. That is where the extra quarter of an hour on a cut usually goes, and you will be told which parts of the shape depend on you drying it a particular way rather than finding out later.

• Towards the high figure: length past the shoulder, a lot of hair rather than fine hair, colour that has to lift rather than simply go darker, and anything that is putting right an earlier decision.
• Towards the low figure: shorter hair, a shape that has been cut here before, and a straightforward finish with no colour in the appointment at all.

Colour is where the hour goes mixed to the moment

Colour moves the arithmetic further than anything else on the list, which is why the widest spans in the ticking sit against it. It is mixed when it is needed rather than in advance, worked through in sections, and then it develops — and developing is simply waiting, which nobody can hurry by standing over it.

A full head takes longer than roots because there is more hair to work through, not because one of them is done more carefully than the other. A toner afterwards adds a further short stretch at the basin. None of it is rushed, and if the clock says the whole thing will not fit, you hear that before the first section is parted rather than after.

Remember that the skin test sits in front of all of this, on an earlier day. It takes a couple of minutes, which means a first colour appointment is really two appointments with a very short one in front — and the arithmetic above only covers the second of them.

If it is going to overrun said early

If the arithmetic and the time you have do not agree, you hear about it at the start, and that means one of three conversations — all of them better had before anything is picked up.

1. Smaller. We do a narrower version of what you asked for and finish it properly inside the time that exists.
2. Split. It runs across two appointments, with the natural break put somewhere sensible rather than somewhere awkward.
3. Later. We put a longer appointment in and you come back to it, with nothing half-done in the meantime.

What will not happen is starting something that needs ninety minutes at the back end of an hour and hoping. If an appointment does overrun once it is under way — which happens, because colour does what colour does — you are told as it happens rather than at the end of it.

The order they run in not the order you ticked

The list in the box runs in the order things happen in the chair, which is not the order they appear in the ticking.

1. Talking. Always first, and nothing is picked up during it.
2. Colour. It goes onto dry hair, so it comes before the basin rather than after it, and then it develops.
3. A toner. At the end of the colour, not at the start of it.
4. The basin. Colour reaches it only once developing has finished, and that rinse runs longer than most people expect, because it is not finished until the water is clear.
5. The cut. A dry cut happens before the water runs at all; a cut after a wash happens after it.
6. The finish. Last, because there is nothing to finish until everything else is done.

Where two stretches could overlap in practice — development time being the obvious one, since waiting is not busy work — the tool makes no attempt to be clever. It adds them end to end in full, which makes the high figure read a little long. Given the choice between a number that flatters us and one that leaves you with your afternoon intact, we would rather be slightly pessimistic.

Once you have a span you are happy with, write to bookings@lilyhairsalon.shop and describe what you ticked. You will get a reply confirming the real time for your hair, and what to put in that first message is set out separately.