Is this Jo'burg's most expensive haircut?

I think I may have just had Johannesburg’s most expensive haircut. I’m still completely traumatised, but I’m starting to emerge from the dazed and confused state that inevitably results when one has had a dreadful shock. I’d put off getting my hair sorted because I know that all hair salons see women coming, but not in a geological era did I expect this.

I had highlights and a cut and a treatment in between, and, benchmarking against prices paid by others recently, I was expecting to be hit for R800 or thereabouts. I was confident I would not get ripped off in this case because this was one of those low key, unpretentious back alley hair salons, with an equally uninspiring name.

The guy who did my hair was a delightfully sweet middle-aged gay Afrikaner (some of my favourite people are gay Afrikaners) and throughout the process I was thinking: finally, I’ve found somewhere I feel comfortable, somebody who I’m actually happy to talk to while he puts foils in my hair. Here was someone who knows his customers — he’s been there for eight years, his clientele mostly Bryanston biddies — and who knows how to keep them loyal. I was even going to tweet nice things about him.

So when he told me the number I thought I was hearing things. I could hear the words, but they didn’t make any sense.

One

nine

five

eight.

People, I have just paid just under two grand for a haircut. I want to throw up. I need therapy.

After the initial shock of the number, I handed over my credit card mutely, much as a mugging victim would do. I peered at the price menu next to the phone in an attempt to see what was listed there, and what could possibly explain this figure. He ran through a rapid list of what I’d had done — so rapid I couldn’t keep track of course — and informed me that this was the total.

I should have confronted him then and there. Why didn’t he show me the menu of prices upfront? Why did he let me go on with treatment after treatment (without realising which was a treatment and which was the standard hair wash deal) without indicating that the total was rising inexorably towards numbers so lofty they defied belief? Ka-ching.

But I’m polite, and I didn’t want to make a scene, and I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. He handed me the credit card receipt — no cost breakdown, just a total figure — and I fled. All I could think, as I opened that door, was: I am never coming back here again.

I only have myself to blame, of course. I should have looked at the price menu. I shouldn’t have assumed that ordinary, unglamorous hair salons in hokkies in little shopping centres don’t charge more than the salons in Sandton City. I shouldn’t have assumed that because he seemed so nice and chatty and wore beige Crocs and a zip-up cardigan that he wouldn’t try to take me for as much as he possibly could. And of course I shouldn’t have allowed him to get away with that old trick all hairdressers use if they can get away with it, when they blowdry your hair and then charge you as much as a half-decent three course restaurant meal for the privilege of doing it.

Overall, he did a good job and he was incredibly thorough with the highlights, but at this price I want a modelling contract and the cover of Women & Home (LSM 9-10 women 35+; hey, I’m realistic) as well as a regular guest slot on Top Billing.

The worst thing is not the money itself. It’s the betrayal. That a man I thought was genuinely nice, a mensch, could sit there knowing I had no idea what any of this cost, watch me get all those so-called treatments, and not tell me what all of this was adding up to — that is what grates me. I trusted him, and he used that trust to rip me off. I feel like such a fool — and of course, technically I am a fool. But that does not give a business the right to take blatant advantage of anyone who walks through its door.

The horribly expensive shampoo and conditioner I accept because at least I knew the price of those and he was selling me the chimeric possibility of bouncy winter hair; I knew what I was in for. But the rest? I want to make this man accountable for the way he treated this particular customer.

Any suggestions on how would be much appreciated.