DO HAIRDRESSERS spend all their free time looking in the mirror, posing, pouting, preening and talking about their holidays in Majorca.

"That's a cliche," says Mairead Mahony, who works in Cats salon in the Westbury Mall in Dublin's city centre. "All those images, they are so wrong."

She resents the misapprehensions about the business. "It's a lovely industry to be in - you need an outgoing personality and it's hard work. But it's not a very highly recognised profession - it's dismissed, in spite of the hours you put in, the hard work and the amount of energy it takes from you to deal with the public."

She emphasises: "It's not as easy as it looks." A young trainee starts at the bottom: an aspiring hairstylist has to be content with sweeping the floor and making the coffee. The days of styling and cutting, perming and colouring can seem a long way off.

"You really need this," Mahony says, "because you're dealing with the public all the time. You need an awful lot behind you. It's great for your training - you're folding towels but you're in the middle of a salon."

Other skills are more specific to the trade. "You'll get to mix up colours - you're getting a knowledge of colour all the time."

After her Leaving Cert in 1984 in Seamount College in Kinvara, Co Galway, Mahony started out by doing a six-month course at Scholar's Hairdressing School in Limerick. After this she got her first job in Shaun's Hair Design in her home town of Kilkee, Co Clare. "He definitely influenced me in a big way," she says of the owner, who encouraged her to move to Dublin to gain more experience.

Within three years she had done so, to Dee Bee's, a hair salon in Ballsbridge. It was here, she says, that her real training began. She was taken on as a third-year trainee and started her apprenticeship all over again. She was a senior stylist when she left three-and-a-half years later.

She rented a chair in a salon in Dublin's Drury Street for about six months. "I'd really think twice about doing it now. It was very ambitious for me, definitely." She then went to Talking Heads at the top of O'Connell Street where she spent four years. "A lot of tourists came in - they're great fun."

She's "an actress to a degree", she says. "You're different with each person. You have to be. And you're a psychiatrist. You listen to everything - they come and throw everything at you!

The customers are there to be pampered - it's very demanding all the time. You'd want to be very stable yourself otherwise you'd be warped at the end of the day.

Mahony says ambition is a prerequisite to becoming a successful stylist. The process of moving from one salon to another is a shrewd, calculated process: a stylist has to gauge exactly how many loyal clients will follow her (or him). This list of customers is an important part of any stylist's desirability as an employee.

"You've got to say, `of course I can do this'. You've got to be ambitious and have the bottle. You'll be left in a backstreet salon and forgotten about unless you are.

She began working in Cats last November. Its city-centre location and clientele appeal to her. "You can see the type of client you're going to work with straight away. It's what I've been looking for all along - it's very mellow, completely organised. The atmosphere is so calm. The client is at ease."

Looking in the mirror, Mahony explains, is not all about vanity, and being able to chat to a client is not just a vacuous exercise. "You are really in her face. You have to read into her face, what's she worried about, and get her into your trust.

"Once you have done it for them once, you have to maintain that. Once they see you slipping at all, you're gone. You've got to be able to produce the goods. It's not just babble.