Anyone out there looking for hairdressing services with a service matching of five-star and that too at an affordable price, then Cream Hair Cheltenham is the place to be. They have been featured in many national magazines and a team of highly qualified professionals, who are passionate about what they offer to the clients. Winners of the most impressive and high-status award known as ‘Wales & South West Hairdresser of the Year’, they construct the most original and inventive hairdressing in this constituency. Cream has an artistic team which has always been in enormous demand of their usual clients and many others. Their award winning team have been demonstrating their skills nationally and now, internationally too.

This may be in danger of turning into a consumer affairs blog, but this one just has to be shared. I visited the Toni and Guy Victoria salon with my then fiancee on 4 May, with a pretty simple brief; just put some loose curls in her naturally straight hair that would largely stay there overnight for our wedding the next morning. I spent quite some time making sure that the stylist, who didn’t have English as a first language, understood what she wanted, which was to have some of her hair pinned up on top of her head but with plenty of it left loose in curls at the back. She told me she understood so I wandered off to do some work and just let her get on with it.

For £65, you would think they could manage to follow instructions. Bear in mind this wasn’t even a haircut, it was just what they called a ‘hair wrap’. The first sign of trouble was when the stylist pinned up *all* of her hair, instead of leaving plenty of it in big loose curls at the back, which was what she wanted. Moreover, she’d done her fringe in a way that totally failed to keep it out of her eyes, and left it straight. Actually, I didn’t think the results looked too bad, but that isn’t the point; it wasn’t the style she wanted and had asked for.

By the time I realised that something was wrong, and that she wasn’t happy, it was too late. We were the last people in the salon and all the staff, most of whom were barely out of their teens and had no concept of customer service, just wanted to go home. There was no question of starting again, which is really what would have been required by that point. I paid, but I didn’t realise at that point just how unhappy she was. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but a woman scorned is a picnic compared to a woman who’s just had a bad hairdressing experience.

If you’ve ever spent any time around a lady miffed with her new ‘do, you’ll know it’s wise to tread very carefully around her. My wife was a combination of utter misery at not having the look she’d wanted for her big day, and raging fury at the stylist who’d screwed up so badly. And rightly so; I felt like throttling the silly creature myself. If you hand over that much cash you should get what you pay for.

But to make matters worse, within about an hour of our getting home, the style began to fall apart anyway. Toni and Guy couldn’t even get the wrong hairstyle right; and my wife ended up having to do her hair herself on her wedding morning. We might as well not have bothered going there at all, for all the good they did us. That was probably the biggest waste of money I’ve ever had the misfortune to be involved in, and it’s the first and last time I go to one of their crappy salons. I did complain, but unlike Opodo, I have yet to receive any kind of response; their corporate website is remarkably vague about the irritating issue of complaints, it seems.