Aine O’Neill

TV producer and salon coordinator

Aine, from Tallaght, is the producer of Salon

Confidential, and also the salon coordinator and receptionist. “I’m the first face the clients see as they come in,” she says. “I’m not a stylist, but I have got a hairdressing background. I started hairdressing when I was 17, part-time, and I loved it, mainly because I love people. I loved doing colour and upstyling as well, but meeting clients and talking to them is what excited me. And it was a way for me to travel the world, which I did, even though media was always my first love.”

Following a diploma in media studies, and then an English and History degree in Carlow, Aine started working in TV production “as a runner, a researcher, at the bottom and I built up from there, working my way up.”

Within the salon space, she stresses that “it’s not just about what’s going on with the clients hair, it’s what’s going on inside their heads. You need to really draw that out of people. The stylists we have, we knew they would get the best out of people while doing such a good job.

So how do you go about persuading someone to share their troubles or concerns? “I think it comes out naturally,” she says. “You can tell when someone has something on their mind — all of the stylists can. If they have a client who has something they want to say or get off their chest, if they need advice, our stylists will recognise that. They are all caring people.”

“When clients come in,” says Aine, “they can relax, get their hair done in a nice environment, and they can talk to someone. If they feel they look better, they feel better, that radiates from the inside. We send them away lighter, happier, feeling better about themselves. How their hair looks is less important than how they feel.”

“Women,” she says, “used to go to salons because they felt pressure to look a certain way. Now, we go because women are running the world and we want to look a certain way. There’s a difference!”