If you’re lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and happen to have an abundance of split ends, you may be one of the lucky few Cerritos students selected to get a free haircut at the Cosmetology department.

While the Cosmetology students usually practice on dummy heads or clients coming in for their low-priced services on Monday’s, some days are particularly slow. Slow enough that the instructor, Ms. Novinski, set out four of her students to find clients to practice on with the promise of a free haircut.

Monet Wrtaza, a cosmetology and business major, said “She [Ms. Novinski] does it occasionally, maybe once a semester, she’ll give us business cards and we’ll pass them out to anyone we think might be interested. We just pick a handful of people and write our names on the back, so when they come in they know to ask for us.”

As easy as giving away free haircuts sounds, there was still an obstacle to overcome.

“Asking is kind of hard,” Wrtaza said. “It was because a lot of people already had haircuts done. You could tell people got haircuts over the weekend, or people had class [to go to]. At the end we did have a really good rush of people, I think we had 15 people come in, and for us that’s a lot on a Monday. Usually Monday’s are pretty slow.”

The usual price for a haircut by a Cerritos Cosmetology student is $5.

While the students working on clients are not licensed yet, Wrtaza assured that most things people ask for they’ve already been taught to do. It’s the surprises that really throw them off and make client work a true learning experience.

“Sometimes clients come by and say they don’t have any color in their hair, and then when you go and lift a color from their hair, other colors pop up that they didn’t tell us about, and then we have to work with that. So that can be, you know? We have to fix it [and] that’s a little nerve-wracking.”

Despite these challenges, students need and enjoy the opportunity to work on real people.

Cosmetology major Troy Garcia said, “It makes me more comfortable, because a doll head you can pull pretty hard on and you can do anything with it. It’s not the same at all because it’s not a real client. That’s why I like taking real clients, because I just want to get more comfortable with people, and not a plastic head.”

Wrtaza echoed the positive reaction to working on real clients.

“It’s good. Most people who come in for a free haircut, it’s nice. They’re not really picky, they just want to get something done and it’s free. We’re not licensed or anything yet so it’s not going to be perfect, but if you come in for a trim or something, that’s pretty simple.”