ANDREW Barton is exactly as he seems on the telly.

Cheeky, charming, chatty and cheerful, Channel 4's favourite makeover maestro is the kind of hairdresser every woman wishes she could have on speed-dial. And he's cutting my hair.

I can't help but let out an accidental giggle as I suddenly realise, for the millionth time this minute, that Andrew Barton from 10 Years Younger is cutting my hair!

It's bound to be terrifically exciting for him, too.

After all, he's come straight to our appointment in London from a Marie Claire magazine shoot, afterwards he's whizzing up to Leeds for a black tie dinner, and yesterday he was running his fingers through Denise van Outen's honey-blonde hair.

Next week he's styling the golden locks of the medal-winning Olympic ladies, and his little black book of clients includes numbers for Kylie Minogue, Penny Lancaster and Girls Aloud.


It's hard to believe that 41-year-old Barton - whose £430 price tag makes him the highest-paid hairdresser in Britain - started his career in Darfield and went to school at Royston Comp.

"Hairdressing wasn't really the done thing for a boy in Barnsley back in the 1980s," he laughs. "But I still get back there about three or four times a year - in fact I was there last weekend.

"My mum Anne and my brother Simon still live there, and my best friend lives at Green Moor. I'm Godfather to his 21-year-old daughter and came back up for her 21st birthday party this summer.

"I do cut my mum's hair now and again, although I make sure she goes every week to Leslie Frances in Barnsley. She's Andrew Barton's mum - I've got to make sure her hair always looks good!"

Barton's salon is Saks in St Paul's, on a busy little side street round the corner from the Old Bailey. It's smaller, and not as intimidatingly 'trendy' as I'd imagined - I'm offered tea or coffee, not Buck's Fizz or bubbly as the swish Sheffield salons provide - and outside legal secretaries and solicitors stride past unfazed by Barton in the window.

The idea is I will put myself entirely in his hands, allow him to do absolutely anything to my hair that he wants to, and decide for myself if his £430 hourly rate is, as they say on the adverts, "worth it".

I am hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, perhaps a radical transformation, and the 'ultimate' haircut - a style that, for my hair and my face shape, cannot be bettered.

The appointment begins with a chat about my hair and my face shape, which Barton tells me is square. That, he says, means no styles with hard, blunt, angular cuts around the jawline, but instead to opt for layering to soften and flatter.

"I don't want to give you anything too structured or straight - I can't see you with very neat sharp lines," he muses. I think you'd look best with something more tousled, something light and layered, something shaggy with a bit of bounce."

Can he tell straightaway what hairstyle would suit each of his clients best?

"Pretty much," he says.

"I start off looking at their body shape, how tall they are, how slim or full-figured they are, how they walk, how they hold themselves. Then I move up to their face shape - not just from the front but looking at their head shape and their face in profile, too. Finally I look at the texture of their hair, and how it will move once it's cut."

I'm sent upstairs via a small spiral staircase to be shampooed - a brisk experience, disappointingly, with no soothing scalp-tingling head-massage - then come back down again for cutting to commence.

Snip-snipping at my split ends with scissors that cost a staggering £1,000 a pair, Barton says:

"I'm going to cut 'into' the hair to create lots of layers, and I'm going to take a lot of the thickness from the back and at the sides."

The appointment flies by, thanks to plenty of chat. Barton is full of funny stories - about the light-fingered client at a salon in Mayfair who tried to slip his hairdryer into her handbag - and unprintable anecdotes about TV stars and celebs. One entertainment stalwart, he confides, is "not really a very nice person at all".

Barton then blowdries my hair and gives me tips on how to style my new look at home - by using a paddle brush, separating the hair into two sections, and running heated straighteners to create movement rather than flatten.

"You've been Bartoned!" he says, then adds with a cheeky grin: "Every haircut has to have a name - I think we'll call this one The Shag..."

So was it worth it?

MEETING Andrew Barton in the flesh was definitely worth it, and the appointment was fun.

My normally heavy hair feels lighter and bouncier than it ever has. It's obvious from the way the layers tumble gently around my shoulders that it's a cut above the average in terms of expertise.

But I was hoping my trip to London would result in a once-in-a-lifetime makeover, the kind of daring do I wouldn't have the guts to choose myself, and I'm disappointed my new look isn't drastically different from my last.

I'm also not sure it's the 'ultimate' hairstyle that simply cannot be improved upon, and I feel I've had more flattering haircuts before. The very styles he says are not for me - sharp, angular bobs - are precisely the haircuts I've had in the past which have received the most compliments!

Back home in Sheffield, I had been hoping my new hair would draw envious 'wows' from family and friends - but instead the consensus was: "It looks lovely, but it's not a dramatic transformation."



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