What follows is a hunt for evidence about themselves. Not 'do they do color' but: has anyone here taken hair this dark this light without wrecking it, cut curl this tight dry rather than wet, worked with hair this fine at this length, blended gray without it going flat. A new client is handing their appearance — the thing everybody they know will see tomorrow — to a stranger for weeks, and it cannot be returned or quietly redone the next morning. So they look for their own head somewhere in the work, and where they cannot find it they assume the answer is no.