"Cute" versus "cool"

I get my hair cut at a minimalist Japanese salon in the East Village. This is like saying I get my coffee at a Starbucks in Manhattan, a McDonalds in America. I picked the salon I go to out of the many because it's especially minimalist-looking, even by minimalist-Japanese-salon standards. The haircuts tend to be quite good as well. The only difficulty is that I do not know Japanese, and am unlikely to any time soon, given that it stands well behind Dutch, Hebrew, Yiddish, and German on the list of languages I ought to know or know better. So while I'm never proud of my ignorance, in this case I'm resigned to it.

When I called to make the appointment, I mispronounced the name of my regular stylist; when I arrived, I saw that my appointment had been made for someone named "Thoered," give or take a letter. Sofia Coppola could have stayed in the States to get her point across. When it came time to describe the haircut I wanted, most could be accomplished via pointing at pictures in a magazine cut-out scrapbook the salon has for that purpose. However, any more specific requests were today, as they have in visits past, met with a discussion of whether I wanted to look more "cute" or "cool." My first visit, I thought "cute" sounded the safer bet, but apparently that means bangs that are shorter in the middle, which wasn't so great, so I decided to go with "cool." I was a bit concerned today, though, when the stylist cutting my hair told me that another woman comes in regularly, a customer who's "very cool," and gets my exact haircut... but with a large section of her hair shaved off in the middle, visible only when the hair is pulled back. This look is, I learned, "cool." I did what I could to explain that I didn't want to look too cool, and am, I'd have to say, happy with the result.