Despite being quite image-conscious, I'd never really gone to a professional hair salon before (apart from Saks for some layers) - instead choosing to stick to my local ones which has always done right by me.

Toni&Guy are a chain of hairdressers - very well-known throughout the UK. It's also unisex, with male and female stylists cutting the hair of male and female customers. They also have their own brand of hair products that are quite cheap and are readily available in Boots stores/supermarkets etc.

Walking into Toni&Guy, you are struck (or should be struck) by how clean and 'trendy' the place is. It's a very professional looking salon, with pictures of various models plastered on the walls with edgy looking haircuts. The stylists themselves were great advertisements for the salon - very trendy, model-esque cuts and very well-styled. The whole image of Toni&Guy is of a professional, trendy salon.

Unfortunately, I couldn't have stressed that to a worse person. My stylist's personal haircut was of a very Egyptian/Cleopatra style - a harsh, wide, short fringe with the Egyptian eyeliner to match. However, I trusted her as the top stylist and it never crossed my mind that she might apply her own opinions on hair to my own, when it was obvious I wanted a completely different cut. She reassured that my pictures were easy and simply enough to copy.

Afterwards I was led back upstairs to my seat and the cutting began. There was music being played - some good songs as well, I enjoyed Faithless' Insomnia before it was cut short by a heavy-handed male receptionist who swapped it for Christmas songs grrrrr hehe.

Now, I'm usually quite nervous when I'm getting my hair cut and am always very tense. I'd like to think I know my hair pretty well and after a multiude of haircuts, I've come to recognise when something's gone wrong. Of course you have to allow for the styling afterwards - the drying, the straightning etc. However, I did not enjoy my experience even the more so as I felt strongly that she was getting it irreversibly wrong.
My fringe was cut in and instantly I felt it was too thick, too wide (it went nearly halfway round my head!) and too short (I had a disastrous short fringe when I was 12 and I'm still traumatised). It didn't look anything like the pictures.
Then she feathered my hair! I hate this more than anything. It makes hair look like a cheap copycat of Jennifer Aniston's 'Rachel' cut from the 90s. By now I was in dread for the finished product.

An hour or so later I arrived home and by this time I'd forgotten just how bad it was, thinking 'oh, maybe it's not THAT bad'. Went to a mirror, took my fringe down and burst into tears again. I'm in the stages of finalising a modelling contract and this, I felt, was not good.
It seemed like there was nothing I could do but wait for it to grow. Unfortunately it resulted in me wearing my fringe up for a couple of weeks until it had grown sufficiently. Even now, just over a month later, I'm still struggling with it, trying to make it look good.

Basically, I wouldn't rule out going back there for maybe a colour or something. Their stylists are usually very good, I've seen lots of very professional, good-looking haircuts from them on people I know and the stylists' own hair styles could have been straight from magazines, even if my own particular stylists' wasn't to my taste. However, I won't recommend them, simply because of the result of my first experience of them.