A colour correction is the one service on a hair menu that honestly cannot have a price next to it. Box dye over bleach over a fashion colour, with two inches of regrowth and a photo of someone else's hair as the goal, might be two hours or two sessions across a fortnight. The client on the phone wants a number anyway. This guide is about having a way to answer that is fair to her and to you.
What the price is made of
Lay it out for yourself before you lay it out for anyone else. A correction is some combination of:
- Removal or lightening, often in stages, with product at a cost you can measure.
- Toning or depositing colour to get to a wearable shade.
- Treatment to leave the hair in a state you are willing to put your name to.
- Time, usually three to six hours of a senior stylist, sometimes across two visits.
- A follow-up appointment to take it the rest of the way.
Each of those has a cost you know. The reason you cannot quote is not that the pricing is mysterious; it is that you do not know which of them the hair needs until you see it and test it.
Charge for the consultation
The consultation is where the price is set, and it is work: fifteen to thirty minutes of a senior stylist's time, a strand test, a plan. Charge for it. A consultation fee that comes off the correction if they go ahead is fair to both sides. It filters out the callers who are ringing six salons for the cheapest guess, and it signals that the correction will be done properly.
Put it on the menu as its own line: colour correction consultation, $40, 30 minutes, redeemable on the service. Now there is a price on the menu, and it is a true one.
The consultation itself
Look at the hair dry and wet. Ask what has been done to it and when, and expect the answer to be incomplete; people forget the box dye from March. Do a strand test, and let the client see it. Then write the plan down with the price next to each stage, including the follow-up, and give her a copy. A written plan with a total is a quote. It stops the conversation at the basin where the number is larger than the one she remembers hearing.
Be honest about what cannot be done in one visit. The client who is told it will take two sessions and gets a result in one is delighted. The reverse is a one-star review.
Set a minimum and a range you will say aloud
Even with the consultation charged, callers want a sense of scale. Decide on a minimum you will never go below for a correction and a range that covers most of them, and be willing to say it: corrections start at $300 and most are between $300 and $600, set at consultation. That sentence is true, it manages expectations, and it does not promise anything the hair might not allow.
Write that sentence in your notes if you use a receptionist line. Glow Line's assistant will say exactly that when a caller asks, and will not improvise a tighter figure, which is the point. Without the note, it says the team will confirm, which is also fine but gives the caller less.
The photo
She will have a photo. Treat it as a direction, not a destination. Say that plainly at the consultation: this is the direction we are heading, and here is where we can get to today. If the photo is of hair that has never been coloured and hers has, say so, kindly. The alternative is a client leaving with hair that is objectively good and subjectively nothing like the photo.
Deposits for corrections
A correction is a long block of a senior stylist and a lot of product. If you take deposits on anything, take one on this. Collect it when you confirm the appointment after the consultation, not at the consultation, so she is paying for a plan she has seen.
When to say no
Some corrections should not be done today: hair that will not survive another lightening, a client who wants a result the strand test says is not there, a timeline that does not fit the chair you have. Saying not yet, and here is what we can do first, is a skill that keeps your name good. The client who is turned away with a plan usually comes back. The one whose hair broke does not.
Saying all this on the phone
The caller who asks how much to fix my colour wants a number and will not get one. What she can get is: a consultation price, a true minimum and range, and a booking request for the consultation. If a person answers, that is a thirty-second conversation. If a receptionist line answers from your notes, it is the same thirty seconds, and you hear about it in a text. Either way she has not been fobbed off with call us, and you have not promised a price you cannot keep.
Pricing a correction well is mostly about refusing to price it until you have seen the hair, and having a confident way to say so.