Tokino Junko, a 22 year old girl with hair till her waist.She was 5ft 10 and had a model look though she worked as a assistant in a model agency. She volunteered to shoot for hair advertisements in return for some money. She has been an assistant to the director of the model agency and has been working over a year
One fine day, As she came to the studio, she was asked to take care of the models for their upcoming shoot and was met by two stylists Chisato and Katsumi from Katsumi's Beauty. The stylists styled three models while the photographer took pictures of their makeover as they waited for the main shoot
The director came in time to witness the shoot and calls Junko "Are we ready to go? Is everyone here?"
"We're waiting on one more," she replied.
"Really?"
She nodded, tapping her tablet impatiently.
"But you should probably get started on the main shoot for now."
The main shoot was themed around life in the office, with each of the girls taking on various personality types while showing off business-casual clothing that probably cost more than any of them would make in a year. The photographer made the shoot fun, asking them to pose on desks and tables and in all sorts of mock meeting situations. The models were wearing a lot of skirts and frilly blouses, and although the other girls wore their hair up as they took shots.
After a couple hours and a few clothing changes, The director was impressed but bothered something as he speaks with the photographer. "I think we've gone as far as we can without the fourth girl. Have you heard from her?"
The director looked pensive as he looked to the three models who had bothered to show up. "Okay. Why don't you girls get back into your civvies and go grab lunch? We should have an idea of what's going on in an hour or so."
The staff then quickly sequestered themselves in a corner of the studio, talking in agitated whispers and Junko helped as the models peeled off the expensive clothes and got back into their jeans and tees. Having gotten along well enough during the shoot, they decided to hit up an eatery nearby that sourced its food from local farms. Before they reached the front door of the studio, however, the director beckoned Junko over.
"You three go ahead," she told the others. With questioning looks, the other girls. Junko tried to put on a brave face.
"Yes?"
"We have a problem."
Junko's heart sank. "With me?"
"No, no. Not at all. With the fourth girl. She's not coming." Told Yokosuka Nobi
"Okay, so what can I help with?" She began to wonder whether they'd ask if she could call in a model. She started listing off names of girls in her social circle who might be free, but it'd be a tough ask on such short notice.
"No we want you to play the role of the edgy boss for the next set of photos." Said the director with the photographer
"The edgy boss?"
"Yup. Do you think you can project a hardass, superior attitude?"
Junko grinned, thinking back to her early teen years. "Yeah, I think I could manage.But I'm a freelance model"
"I don't mind, I need models and I need them fast"
"Umm.. Alright sir" Junko said fidgeting her long skirt.
"Perfect. Unfortunately, we're going to have to give you a completely different look, but we'll be compensating you for it, of course."
"Different look? What do you mean?" She assumed different clothes would be involved, obviously, and maybe harsher hairdos and make-up. But why go out of the way to say that would be considered unfortunate?
"Your hair," the director replied, in such a matter-of-fact manner that Junko felt a little like an idiot.
"Wh...What?"
"The girl next door look isn't going to work for this, so we're going to need to chop it and lighten it a bit."
Junko's heart froze. "What? No!"
The director raised an eyebrow. "We need you to do this for us."
Junko gathered her long, soft locks over her left shoulder and shook her head. "But I… I…"
"Do you remember, You signed a contract that said as a freelance model, we are authorised to choose anything for our model, Junko." He held up the iPad, as if Junko could have forgotten that.
"But that was just for the time period, hence I was told to get serious about it!"
"That's not what the contract wording says. If you want to take time to call your senior and talk about it, that's fine, but we're on a schedule here. If you take too long, the contract is going to be considered broken, and that means you'll have to cover the costs of this entire shoot, including me and my time. Can you afford that?"
Junko's vision wavered as tears started to spill down her cheeks. "No, I can't… but you said…"
"Here, before you start crying. This is what we're willing to pay you for going this extra mile for us." the director scrolled down and showed her the new number.
It was no longer just a matter of paying one month of her rent share, but more than a year's.
Junko stroked the length of her hair again.
"It's your call. You can either be the hero of the day, and a well-paid one, or a known problem in the industry. What do you say?"
Katsumi who was called came forward and the director stepped away and patted the back of the stylist chair. "Have a seat?"
Junko turned to look at herself in the mirror as she backed up and sat in the seat. Junko ran her fingers through the long, brown waves of her treasured mane as they fell across her white dress, and then with a startling finality her ass met the leather of the chair and she felt like she sealed her one true beauty's fate.
"How… How much do you have to cut?" she inquired
"Just to a inch or so," Katsumi Kejoro assured her, flipping the white cape across Junko's lap once again.
The girl let out an audible sigh, wondering why the director hadn't just said that from the start.
One inch wasn't terrible… it was barely more than a trim. But then she realized the bulk of her new paycheck must be to compensate for the lighter color, and if the lightness was in any way related to the size of the paycheck… Junko began to wonder what she was in for.
Katsumi Kejoro spent a long time brushing out Junko's hair, with each brushstroke followed immediately by caressing fingers. It went a long way to calm Junko's fears, but not completely. She wished her manager hadn't gone on vacation – something about this set up didn't feel right, even if everyone involved had stellar professional reputations.
After pausing to murmur something to her assistant, Katsumi gathered Junko's heavy mane up into a ponytail close to the crown of her head. With quick swirling motions, she bound it with two rubber bands, one right at the ponytail's base and one just a couple of inches further down.
"Okay, let's get rolling." Said the director
"Wait!"
Junko screamed
"What?"
"You said you were only cutting an inch!"
Junko's reflection in the mirror rolled its eyes. "Child, we would not be paying you that much money if we were only taking off an inch. That's career-altering money for…"
Katsumi set her familiar silver shears just past the second rubber band and began opening and closing its blades.
Junko's mouth fell open as a horrible, terrifying crunching assaulted her ears. Again and again Katsumi opened and closed the scissors, not even slowing as Junko squeezed her eyes closed and felt tears slide down her cheeks. She hid her face in her hands, not wanting to see the cause of the rhythm tugging on her hair, the source of the tension that kept pulling her hair and yet grew a little weaker with every gut-churning crunch that sounded.
Despite the brutality of the sensations and the sounds, it felt like Katsumi's scissors were taking forever to claim Junko's beloved hair as their own.
"My hair…" Junko whimpered. She finally forced herself to peak through her fingertips, a new whimper rising in her throat as she saw ragged ends of her once gorgeous mane that had slid free from the rubber band to tease her right cheek. Katsumi's scissors were still working their way through her ponytail, though each ensuing snip seemed to sound a little bit faster than the one before it.
"My word, you have a healthy head of hair," Katsumi said. "I'm going to have to resharpen my blades after this."
"It was gorgeous," the director added.
With a final snap, the tension pulling at the back of Amelia's head finally released. the director, smiling in the mirror, Katsumi held up the banded ponytail she had seized, a treasure of gorgeous brunette silk that was at least a foot and a half in length, thick and uniform in density and lazy waves. The type of hair that infected passersby with envy; the type of hair that was meant for shampoo commercials.
"Don't worry, junkoy, this will go to a good cause." said Katsumi
Junko tried not to start crying again as Katsumi set her magnificent ponytail down on a table behind her. A good cause, she kept repeating to herself. Probably one of those hair charities that made wigs for women or little kids with cancer. If that were the case, at least something good would come from having her hair taken from her.
With a snap of the second rubber band, Junko's remaining hair spilled free around her. Springing up into disheveled waves, the rough-edged bob barely made it past her chin, and it was considerably shorter toward the back. She hated it. She absolutely hated it already.
Misting water suddenly attacked her, and Katsumi's moved a comb harshly through the remaining locks until they were thoroughly soaked. "Don't worry. This is going to be a bit rough, but once we're all done, you'll look amazing."
Junko somehow doubted that, and was grateful when Katsumi nudged her head forward, forcing her to look down into her lap instead of into the mirror. Katsumi's fingers, somehow gentle despite their intent, slipped through her hair at the crown of her head. There was a soothing sense to them, almost like a massage of some sort, until she felt Katsumi's fingers close together with the stylist's palm flat against Junko's scalp. The angry shears started snipping and snapping again, each chilling sound followed without fail by a soft, dark lock of hair falling against the white sheet covering Junko's lap.
Circling again and again between each spurt of butchery, Katsumi's hand moved across and up and down Junko's nape, shearing and cutting without mercy or regard for what she was going through. As she worked, Junko comforted herself by watching the hypnotic sway of the curtain of lush locks that remained around her face, but with growing anxiety she recognized the fact that Katsumi's hands were constantly moving forward, snatching up thick hanks of soft hair that were growing longer and longer, but chopping them off just as brutally short as the rest. Junko closed her eyes and tried to block it all out, but couldn't avoid the undeniable sensation of each heavy, wet lock plopping into her lap after it had been shorn.
Soon, there was no soft silkness laying against her ears, and shortly after that the face-framing highlights she had just received came to rest atop the heavy pile of beautiful, shiny locks in Junko's lap. She tried to look away, her gaze unfortunately falling to the screen of the photographer's laptop,
And even after today's payday, there was a very real chance she wouldn't work as a model again.
With a gentle lift with a hand placed below Junko's chin, Katsumi lifted her gaze to the mirror before her.
"Okay, that's the worst of it. Not so bad, right?" said the director admiring her look
Katsumi's scissors brow furrowed as Junko looked at her reflection and fought back tears. Of course that was the worst of it – how could anything else be worse than all of that?
So much more hair rested in her lap than on her head – so, so much more. Where there were once flowing, bouncy waves of brunette beauty, there was now just a wild, almost angry, crop of brunette cowlicks.
None of her hair, not one single lock or tress, was more than an inch or so long, and none of it had any sort of order as it stuck out from her head this way and that. Aside from its beautiful, rich color, there was simply nothing recognizable about the treasured mane she had just a few minutes ago.
Katsumi returned to the mirror's reflection with Chisato in plastic gloves on her hands and a bowl in her grasp.
"Now it's time for stage two." Said the director.
Chisato set the bowl down on a table next to her and smearing a brush full of it contents across some of the wild locks sprouting from her crown.
Junko whimpered again, closing her eyes as the concoction was spread across what remained of her hair, its stink filling her nostrils. She kept her eyes closed the entire time, right up until, after she thought the process had been completed, Chisato lifted her chin once more and spread the same stuff across each of Junko's eyebrows.
"I like when everything matches," the director said as a way of explaining.
Junko pressed her lips into a pout again, looking away from Katsumi and flushing when she realized that the photographer had been taking pictures of her in this chair with her hair being meticulously assaulted.
"Don't worry, I got every step," he said, as if that was what she wanted to hear. A burning sensation rose in her cheeks, born from the humiliation of knowing there would be pictures of the worst day in her life.
Over the next hour, Junko just sat and waited. Waited for everyone to return from an errand with a sandwich for lunch, for the two models to return from their lunch to see her like this, for the smelly concoction of her head to remove every last trace of the beautiful, rich brown color her hair had been.
Finally, after a round of toner and a shampoo – the quickest shampoo Junko could ever recall receiving, she found herself seated in Katsumi's chair again, though the mirror, suspiciously, had been moved away. The floor surrounding the chair was covered in the pampered brunette waves that had been shorn from her head, and a new black cape waited to envelop her for whatever Katsumi had planned next.
"Okay, this is going to sound scary," She insisted as she shuffled around behind Junko, "But it's going to look great. And kind of feel great."
Junko started to turn to look over her shoulder, but Katsumi's hand quickly braced itself at the crown of her head. Gentle pressure guided Amelia to look down at her lap again, and then a quick snap created a quiet rumble sounded behind her.
"Oh god…"
"Trust me"
Junko slumped in the chair and felt cold, nibbling teeth press against the nape of her neck. The tone of the clippers changed drastically when they encountered her thick hair, slowing a little as they were pushed upward to the curve of her crown. A brief pause sounded when they were lifted away, and then slowly, dramatically, a puff of pure white fuzz fell into Junko's lap.
Again the clippers ran up the back of her head, and again a tuft of white blonde hair fell into her lap, its stark contrast with the black cape screaming out for attention as the shutters of Mr Nobi's camera clicked again and again.
Junko started shedding tear, she was not able to managed. Her moans couldn't be heard due to the rhythm of the clippers – their gentle nibbling and nipping; their soft purr against her slowly denuded scalp – was amazingly somehow pleasant to experience. In that, Katsumi had not been wrong. Eventually, Junko's head was tilted to the left, and the clippers continued their abuse of her tortured hair, carving her ear free from any sort of cover or caress from her once beautiful locks. In her lap, the dry, harsh pile of clippings grew. The entire cape had become covered in the dustings of her hair, turning it from pure black to a mottled shade of grey.
When the models finally returned, their gasps echoed throughout the studio. A million questions lingered behind their eyes but they quickly died; Junko imagined the director had become glaring them into silence. Eventually, but not before the pure humiliation of having her peers watch her actively be lowered on the social ladder of appeal and desirability, his assistants guided them away and began telling them what the plans for the afternoon's shoot were.
With her left ear freed from the tyranny of adorable tuck-behinds, Junko's head was lifted to look straight forward again. The misting bottle returned, soaking the short tufts of hair remaining atop Junko's head. That was followed by the semi-harsh comb, each stroke scratching against her scalp in a way that never happened when her hair was long, and then the searching, gathering fingers of Katsumi's left hand. Again and again they captured locks of Junko's hair between them, and again and again Junko's shears reduced them down to barely more than a finger's width of a white blonde field of wheat.
Katsumi started at Junko's forehead, with the rainfall of shorn locks continuing unabated as she moved backward. Soon, though, the shorn remains were too short even for the stylist's fingers, and it was her comb and scissors alone making sure no hair – if there was even any left – was out of place. There were no longer hungry, angry crunches or agile schnikts of the blades; there simply wasn't enough left to offer any sort of audible resistance.
After the last snip, Katsumi circled her, her fingertips slipping through whatever hair was left on Junko's head, smoothing and sorting it as best she could. Some product was used, carefully sculpting Junko's new style into exactly what Katsumi wanted it to be. Though Junko felt a burning resentment for the stylist, she had to admit she was taking the work seriously. At least Junko hadn't butchered her for no reason, though that was small consolation and her hair would go to a good cause.
"Can I see it?"
"Not yet. I want your makeup done first."
"You realize I'm going to bawl my eyes out, right?"
Katsumi smiled, pulling a cart filled with makeup to her side. "I'll use waterproof stuff."
After her makeup had been applied and first clothing change provided, Junko walked past the models to step in front of the mirror. They both looked just about the same as in the morning,
Junko, meanwhile, in just about any sense of the notion, could not have looked more different. Gone were the soft, flirty skirts, replaced instead with form-fitting leather pants and high heels. The white blouse she'd been given lacked the top two buttons, revealing the black bra beneath that did its best to enhance the curves within its hold. And undone bowtie accented her slender shoulders, the same shoulders that once were graced by the flowing, soft waves of her shampoo-commercial-worthy hair.
And above the bowtie, there was just her neck – her long, elegant neck – and then her ears, the same ears she always thought stuck out a bit too much to be perfect, but remained small enough to be cute. Then, finally, her hair.
Styled in a brutally short pixie, the only notable length was the bit that graced her forehead. Styled into a harsh parting, it soon gave way to a velvety covering toward her crown, and from there, into near nothingness surrounding her ears and at her nape. If she said that all of her hair was gone, she doubted anyone would call her a liar.
Even her eyebrows – the dark, elegant arches that accentuated her moods and expressions so perfectly – they could not escape the change. They were just as blonde as her hair now, barely noticeable against her pale complexion even as she furrowed her brow with regret. Even with the bold red lipstick Chisato had applied and the ultra-heavy eyeliner that drew attention to her immaculate lashes and the heartwarming, brown color of her eyes, she felt like there was nothing about her to make her stand out in a crowd now. She was just… nothing. Just someone who couldn't possibly stand out in a pile of headshots.
This would be her last job in modeling. She just knew it.
Holding back the tears that wanted to come, she turned away from the mirror and found herself staring at everyone else working on the shoot. She wasn't sure if it was anticipation or concern on their faces, as if they were waiting for her ti lose control and start sobbing hysterically. But she was a professional, damnit. She was going to act like one.
After the shoot, Junko rolled her eyes. Walking toward the exit, she was sure the other girls were just being nice. But still… She eyed a bathroom near the front door and went to duck inside, waving her goodbyes to the others.
As always, for some reason, the lighting in the women's bathroom was fantastic. Junko used it to her full advantage, eyeing the bleach-blonde stranger in the mirror's reflection. Was she gorgeous? She still wasn't sure. But while she had always thought of herself as a pretty girl with gorgeous hair, her reflection was that of a beautiful woman – even without makeup – with enchanting eyes and adorable cupid's bow lips. Her nose was petite and pointy, but not too long, and the ears that seemed to be waving for attention had their own certain type of charm. Perhaps they wanted people to notice the cheekbones that had, until now, been hidden under her blankets of hair.
She ran her hand up the back of her head. Her beautiful hair was no more. The style, perhaps, had its own allure, but her hair itself was now stiff and harsh. Sharp to the touch as she moved her hand up and down. The bleach had completely destroyed it, sapped it of both its gorgeous color and its trademark silkiness, leaving behind a terrible corpse that held only one benefit – it was so short that her natural color would be grown out within months, if not weeks. She already couldn't wait to see it again.
The length, however, would not be so easily regained. Junko let out a soft sigh as she slung her backpack over her shoulder again and headed for the door. She didn't want to do the math of how long it would take her brunette waves to grow back. Didn't want to worry about whether it would retain the texture and feel of her youthfulness as she tried to grow it back to its former glory.