So I sat down in the chair (at a Regis in Regina, Sask., how cute) and showed my hairdresser a picture of the layered look I wanted--nothing terribly complicated, just something below the shoulders and face-framing. Towards the end of the blow-drying I find that what looked like any haircut that I've gotten in the past when my hair was wet turned into a blunt cut with a couple of chunky bits that ended up looking more like overgrown bangs than layers. I looked at the magazine photo, which was of someone with hair slightly longer and gently layered all over, then looked at the six-inch chunks of my hair on the floor, and nearly cried.
Right-O. Somehow she blow-dried a second time such that it ended up looking "not-bad", and my sister's impatience to get out and do more Wedding Stuff kept me from staying for a fix-up, but I ended up coming back, armed with the magazine photo, to have the layers evened out because looking like an old woman, which the blunt cut certainly made me do, drove me crazy. No dice again; this time, I ended up with a shorter blunt cut and still-chunky bangs. I just smiled, nodded, and left, fuming. Because if it's that hard to understand "Please cut my hair like this <points to uncomplicated haircut in magazine>," (twice) I surely couldn't deal with having my hair eventually cut to just below my ears. The chunky layering drove me so crazy that I took a pair of scissors to my hair and actually improved the job...
At least it was short enough to be easily put into an updo for the wedding; the stylist (same salon, different person) told me that my hair was almost too long for an updo--while another stylist was putting my fellow bridesmaid's waist-length hair (mine used to be that long <sob>) into an almost identical hairstyle. It's grown two inches since then, and I'm not touching it until November except to have it relayered with my usual stylist.