A Visit from "The Man"

Wednesday was a long day for everyone at school, from the instructors, to the students, to the director. We had a visit from State Board all throughout the day, and they weren't too kind to us. A lot of the daytime advanced class students were grilled at their stations about safety and sanitary regulations, and apparently a lot of the areas of the school were not up to par. Of course, the school isn't at all filthy or unsanitary, but we just have some areas that we need to improve. Luckily, we didn't drop a grade, so we just have to make cleanliness a higher priority and we'll be prepared the next time they come.

Our instructors and the director of the school were definitely NOT happy with us and the whole school got a decent lecture before we started class. Once my class and the advanced class were dismissed, my class spent about an hour painstakingly cleaning our kits. Some of our brushes took 5 minutes a piece to clean, and the hair had to be removed strand by strand.

Lesson learned (and this doesn't just apply to cosmetology): if you clean a little bit every day, things never get out of hand. Our kits had been neglected for too long, and now our instructor has rearranged our class schedule to allow for kit-cleaning time at the end of each class.

When we were finally done with cleaning, we only had a short amount of time left in practical, so we learned a relatively simple new technique called wrapping. This is mostly popular with clients with ethnic hair, and is basically a really low maintenance style. You literally wrap the hair around the head and it ends up looking like a chocolate donut (if the hair is brown!). It's either set in the dryer, or you sleep in it. When you brush it out, the ends are smooth and the crown has crazy volume.

There are two kinds of wraps:

A flat wrap

and a doobie wrap!

I picked this up on my first try, but I had a little advantage because my roommate freshman year of college was black and I watched her do this every night. I was always so intrigued by the idea of brushing your hair in a complete circle and it turning into a socially acceptable style by morning (mine sure wouldn't turn out that way!). I never knew much about African-American hair until I lived with her, so I'm glad I finally got a chance to use some of the knowledge I gathered from her :)