Tabatha Coffey tells it like it is in ‘It’s Not Really About the Hair’

Beauty schools owe a big debt of gratitude to all those celebrity hairstylists. The schools couldn’t pay for all the free recruiting.

After all, the profession promises such a glamorous life. You spend a few months in haircutting school, then go to work in a salon, meeting interesting people, building a business and waiting to be ‘‘discovered’’ — which leads, of course, to celebrity clients, maybe your own reality TV show, product endorsements, John Edwards’ hair — well, maybe not. But your roots would grow out before you could finish naming all the clip artists who’ve become stars in their own right in the past few decades, from Vidal Sassoon on down the list to Christophe, to Ken Paves to Ted Gibson to Eric Alt to Tabatha Coffey.

At this point, a few words of caution are needed, and Coffey provides them, in the way of a book. You will recognize her as the Aussie who competed on the Bravo reality show Shear Genius, and who now has her own show, "Tabatha’s Salon Takeover," Monday nights on Bravo. If you’ve seen her, you know she speaks her mind. In fact, those who’ve watched her on Bravo have seen her reduce more than one lazy or recalcitrant stylist to tears.

You can expect and you will get the same plain-speaking in "It’s Not Really About the Hair: The Honest Truth About Life, Love and the Business of Beauty," co-written with Richard Buskin. Coffey gives us an unvarnished memoir of discovering one’s passion early, then scrapping, clawing and struggling to pursue it. No wonder she doesn’t suffer fools. Having paid the price to get where she is, Coffey doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who expect to have an easy life handed to them, or who don’t respect and take good care of their clients.

‘‘Unconventional’’ inadequately characterizes Coffey’s youth in Australia. If many of us start life with a blank canvas, she got handed a coarse tapestry. Her parents operated Adelaide strip clubs starring flamboyant drag queens. Her father was an alcoholic, prone to dangerous rages, who eventually abandoned his family, leaving her mother broke with young children to feed. Coffey’s friends were the transvestites. At school she was a round, chubby peg in a square hole, an outsider; backstage in the clubs, no one judged her. The performers, she says, treated her like a beautiful little girl and taught her by example to have the courage to be herself and pursue her dreams.

And she did. Immersed in a glamorous world, watching the performers’ nightly transformation into glittering, beautiful women, Coffey soon knew that she wanted to help people express, through their hair, the person they were inside, rather than what the world expected them to be.

In "It’s Not Really About the Hair," Coffey traces her career from working for free at a salon where she learned to shampoo clients — and got down on her hands and knees to scrub the tile floor with a toothbrush — to apprenticing at a larger salon, while attending classes one day a week. The Aussie program was difficult — it took four years for Coffey to become a hair stylist in a system made to weed out all but the most dedicated trainees. She eventually made her way to England, trained at Vidal Sassoon’s academy, and the rest, as they say, is history — laced with years of long, standing-on-one’s feet days, building and rebuilding client lists, dealing with salon owners running the gamut from near-criminal to genius, and then a move to America and the good fortune of linking up with Bravo.

Coffey pulls no punches. Her language is salty, sometimes crude, blunt to a fault. Anyone thinking of going into the beauty profession ought to be required to read this book. Anyone submitting their hair, nails or skin to the mercy of a hair stylist, or a nail tech or other specialist in the beauty arts should read it as well, for its eye-opening analysis of what a salon should properly be.

Otherwise, it’s just a great read, inspiration from someone who paid the dues to do the work she loves, and found success beyond her dreams.