Eight questions a hair consultation should answer before you buy anything

A consultation can run forty minutes and leave you with nothing you can do differently. Another takes ten and changes tomorrow morning. Time is not the measure. The measure is how many of these eight you can say out loud when it ends.

This is a different list from the one you take to a salon chair. That one is about a haircut: the shape, the length, the upkeep, and the words that make a stylist hear what you meant. It lives at haircut consultation questions, and for booking a cut it is the right list. The eight here are about the hair itself, the condition you wear every day between appointments.

One more thing before the list. A consultation that answers six of the eight and says plainly that it cannot answer the other two has done better work than one that answers all eight with confidence it has not earned. Watch for the admission. It is the strongest signal on offer.

Three separate facts hide under the word 'type', and people use it for all three. Curl pattern is the shape a strand grows in. Texture is how thick one single strand is across. Density is how many strands sit in a patch of scalp. They move independently. Fine strands can grow at high density, and coarse strands can grow sparsely.

The American Academy of Dermatology describes hair types on a scale that runs from fine and straight to thick and tightly coiled, and its advice is to choose products that say they are made for your hair type. That instruction is unusable until you know which one you are. A consultation that says 'wavy' and stops has given you a third of an answer.

You can do this yourself in two minutes with the hair type chart and the density and thickness tests. What a reading adds is a second opinion on hair you have looked at so long that you have stopped seeing it, plus one detail most people miss: where your hair differs from itself. The nape is often finer than the crown, and the two behave differently in the same routine.

Your scalp is skin, and it has its own state independent of the hair growing out of it. Oily by the afternoon. Tight and dry. Flaking. Itchy without flakes. Tender when you press it. Or nothing at all, which is also an answer and one worth hearing.

Flakes in particular get misread. The American Academy of Dermatology lists two ordinary reasons for them that have nothing to do with dandruff: not shampooing often enough, and not using the right conditioner, oil or scalp moisturiser for your hair type. So a flake is a symptom with several ordinary causes and one or two that need a doctor. A consultation should say which it thinks it is looking at, and say when it cannot tell.

The useful version of this answer is specific about place and timing. Flakes sitting on the scalp at the part, or flakes carried in the hair. Oil at the roots eight hours after washing, or oil by the second day. Those details decide the shampoo and the wash schedule, which is why the next answers depend on this one.

Damage has a location and a history, and the location tells you the history. Roughness only in the last few centimetres is usually age and friction, because those ends are the oldest hair on your head. A rough band starting partway down often marks where colour or a straightener has been reaching. Breakage around the hairline or at a part line points at tension rather than heat.

The American Academy of Dermatology names the usual causes plainly: brushing 100 strokes a day can cause split ends, flat irons belong on dry hair at a low or medium setting no more often than every other day, and braids, cornrows, ponytails and extensions worn continuously pull on the hair until it breaks. If the tension keeps up, the loss can become permanent.

A consultation earns its fee by naming which of these you are doing, not by listing all of them. Anyone can recite the list. Reading your ends and saying 'this is the flat iron, not the colour' is the part that takes looking. If you want the full repair side of it, that lives at split ends and breakage.

A consultation that names five changes has named none. You will do two of them, forget which two, and have no way of telling what worked.

Ask for one. Then ask why that one is first. A good answer connects the change to something in your own reading: the wash gap is longer than your scalp oil can tolerate, so move it; the conditioner is going on at the roots where it is flattening hair that was already fine; the flat iron is running daily on hair that is already rough at the ends. A weak answer names a product you do not own yet.

The first change should usually cost nothing. Timing, order, quantity and technique are free, and they are where most routines are actually going wrong. Buying comes later, once you know the change held. If a consultation opens with a shopping list, it has skipped the diagnosis and gone to the till.

There is no general answer to this, and the size of the honest range is the reason the internet keeps getting it wrong. The American Academy of Dermatology puts straight hair with an oily scalp at possibly every day, and dry, textured, curly or thick hair at washing when needed, with a floor of at least once every 2 to 3 weeks. That is the same organisation, on the same page, giving two instructions that are twenty times apart.

So the answer you want is a number for your scalp, not a rule for everyone. It should come with a thing to watch: if the roots shine by the afternoon of day two, the gap is too long for you; if the ends feel rough and the scalp feels tight, it is too short.

A consultation should also say what to do on the days between, because that is most of your week. The mechanics of both live at how often to wash your hair. What belongs in the consultation is the number and the reason it is that number for you.

Two lists, and the second one is worth more because it is free. Stopping the daily flat iron, or moving conditioner off the roots, or loosening the ponytail, changes your hair without a purchase.

For the buy list, insist on the label rather than the brand. 'A shampoo whose label says it is for oily scalps, used at the scalp only' is an instruction you can follow in any shop in any country. A brand name is an instruction that expires. Formulas get reworked, products get discontinued, and the same name carries a different formula in different markets. We think naming brands is the single most common way hair advice goes stale within a year of being written.

The answer should also say how much and where. Conditioner is the clearest case: the American Academy of Dermatology puts it on the ends for fine or straight hair and along the whole length for dry or curly hair. Same product, two instructions, decided by the reading in question one.

Without a date, you cannot check the advice, and you will drift back to the old routine without ever knowing whether the new one worked.

The honest timelines differ by what you changed. Scalp oil and flaking respond within a few wash cycles, so two to three weeks is a fair first look. Ends do not repair; they grow out. Scalp hair grows about 0.35 mm a day, which StatPearls puts at roughly 1 cm a month or 15 cm a year, so removing a damaged band 6 cm long is a six-month job with scissors involved. Shedding is slower still: the American Academy of Dermatology describes excess shedding that follows a stressful event starting a few months after it, with fullness returning over six to nine months.

Ask for the date. Write it down. Then judge the change on that day rather than on the Tuesday you feel discouraged, which for most people arrives in week two.

This is the question that separates a consultation worth trusting from one that is selling. No routine treats an infection, restarts a follicle, or corrects a hormone problem.

The American Academy of Dermatology lists the signs that come with hair loss and point at something medical: burning or stinging before hair falls out suddenly, intense itching and tenderness where the hair is going, which can mean an infection, scaly bald patches with sores or blisters that open and ooze, and redness and swelling with sores that leak. It also describes hair loss that arrives fast, including a bald patch or strip that appears within one or two days.

A consultation that sees any of those and answers with a bottle has failed, whatever else it got right. The longer version of this boundary, with the shedding numbers and what a dermatologist actually does at the visit, is on when a hair consultation should send you to a doctor.

Ask the question directly, in the words above. Most skipped answers are not hidden, they were just never requested, and a stylist who is mid-blow-dry will happily tell you where your damage starts if someone asks.

If the answer comes back vague, the useful follow-up is 'what would I see, and when?' That turns an opinion into something you can check. Advice that cannot be checked is advice you can ignore.

This is the shape we built the Kurli AI Specialist around. It reads three photographs and four tapped answers, then returns the reading, one starting change, wash-day steps with the reason attached to each, what to do between washes, a seven-day calendar, ingredients to look for and avoid, and a plain note when something belongs with a doctor or a stylist instead. Follow-up questions are included, which matters most for question seven, because that is the one you only get to ask three weeks later. It reads hair and scalp, and it does not diagnose. That limit is in the list above for a reason.