Her long black hair is edged with "flashing red floodlights". It's "dipped and chunky in the front", explains Melissa O'Neill. It's the latest style. And part of her job, she adds, is to look smart and fashionable.
She's wearing lilac bell-bottoms, a white sleeveless top and a heavy gold chain. She's bright and friendly and it's easy to see that she's completely committed to her job. "It's lovely," she says.
For the 18-year-old junior stylist, it's another day in Perrystown at "Simply Elegant", a hairdressing salon on Whitehall Road West in Dublin. She's already had a young woman in for a colour job and created a head of "Cadbury brown hair with gold blond floodlights going through it"; and a teenage girl came for a colour job involving blue dips on the ends of long black hair. An older client wanted a perm of tight curls. Older clients are not as adventurous, she explains. O'Neill is currently studying extensions, attending part-time workshops and lectures at Crumlin College of Further Education. In September, she'll begin a two-year master's course in hairdressing at Crumlin College, studying part-time as she continues to work. She'll become a senior stylist at the salon in September, having completed her apprenticeship.
O'Neill has worked at "Simply Elegant" for four years, training as an apprentice and studying at Crumlin College. She is very interested in new styles and fashions. "I love anything trendy and anything mad. Colouring is brilliant. Hairdressing is about colour. There are so many different styles and colours. It's all mad. It's blue, red. All the colours of the rainbow. Young people are really up for it."
She has about 50 people who come in regularly to have their hair cut, permed, coloured, maintained or re-shaped by her. The only thing she hates about the job is standing on her feet all day, but "you get used to it. You have to keep smiling. They don't know what to make of you if you're not smiling." In her current position in the salon, she does "colouring, blow-drying, sets, perming and basic cutting. It's the hardest job, working with the public. It's totally different to working in an office. You have to be patient and pleasant. I never thought I had patience." But she's found that she has.
"I knew I wanted to leave school. I knew I wanted to do hairdressing. It's totally different every single day. Going to the hairdressers with my mother when I was young, I loved it." When she was in Junior Cert year, she saw an add for an apprentice hairdresser at Simply Elegant. She began work in 1997, attending the part-time lectures in hairdressing on Mondays all through the year as part of her foundation year. She believes it was her interest in hairdressing that secured the job as an apprentice.
She took to it immediately. "People depend on us to make them look beautiful. They talk to us. You get close to clients and they get close to us. That's the way you keep your clients." She has gone on to do junior trade certificate and senior trade certificate exams, awarded by the Department of Education. She's also done short courses in order to continually up-date her skills.
Her ambition is to travel. She's thinking of getting a job on one of the cruise ships. "It would be exciting," she says. As a fully qualified hairdresser, "I can do what I want to do, which is to travel the world."
