Almost every haircut that goes wrong goes wrong in the conversation before it. Not because either party lied, but because two people used the same words to mean different lengths, and nobody stopped to check.
A consultation that takes five minutes and asks the right things will prevent most of it. If your stylist runs one, let them. If they do not, run it yourself.
What a good stylist asks
How do you dry it, and how long do you spend? This is the most important question in the room and it is asked least often. A cut that needs fifteen minutes with a round brush is a bad cut for someone who leaves the house with wet hair, however well it suits them in the mirror at the salon.
Where does it sit when you have not touched it? Hair has a natural fall and a growth pattern, and both of them will win eventually. A stylist who cuts to a photograph without checking the cowlick at the crown is setting up a fringe that will part itself in three weeks.
What have you had done to it chemically, and when? Not just colour. Relaxers, keratin treatments, bleach two years ago, a home box dye you would rather not mention. All of them change how the hair cuts and how it takes anything applied afterwards.
What did you hate about the last one? More useful than what you liked. People struggle to describe a haircut they want and are extremely precise about the one they resented.
What to volunteer
The maintenance you will actually do. Say the true number, not the aspirational one. “I will not blow-dry this” is one of the most helpful sentences available to a stylist and one of the least often spoken.
Bring two photographs, and bring them of hair with a texture like yours. A photograph of a straight bob does not tell a stylist what to do with a wave pattern; it tells them what you want the outcome to feel like, which is useful, and what shape to cut, which is not.
Say the length in centimetres or with your fingers on your own hair. “Just a couple of inches” is famously the phrase that means three different things to three different people.
The bit about texture that keeps getting missed
If your hair curls at all, the cut should be assessed dry, at least partly. Curl shrinks by anything from a quarter to a half of its wet length, and a line that looks correct wet can land three inches higher once it dries. Any stylist who cuts curly hair exclusively wet and does not check the result dry is guessing.
The same applies in reverse to very fine straight hair, where wet cutting is fine and the risk is over-thinning. Ask what thinning shears are for before they are used, because on fine hair the answer is often “nothing good”.
The one question worth asking them
How would you cut this if I asked for nothing?
It is not a trick. A stylist looking at your hair without a brief will tell you where the weight actually wants to sit, and that answer is frequently better than the photograph in your phone — or at least it will tell you why the photograph was never going to work.
