“A thousand pounds for a haircut?!” I hear you say. “But you could feed an African village for a year… buy two Hermès belts… how can any hairdo be worth that sort of money?”

Either you need your head examined, expensively, or you’re tidying topiary for a palace. Who spends a grand on something that’s going to grow out?

The answer is that oligarchs’ wives and assorted A-listers spend £1,000 for a haircut. The likes of Lady Gaga, Linda Evangelista, Michelle Pfeiffer, Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie. Pippa Middleton goes to the maestro’s salon – or hairspa as it’s known. And the Duchess of Cambridge? If she does, nobody’s saying.

Welcome to the world of Rossano Ferretti, the 53-year-old coiffeur who’s leading a hair revolution. Ferretti is to 2013 what Vidal Sassoon – creator of the five-point cut and Ferretti’s mentor – was to the Sixties.

You haven’t heard of him? That’s forgivable, as he only opened his hairspa in London last year. But he’s ginormous. He has 20 hairspas from Beverley Hills to Milan, is a global spokesman for L’Oreal, runs hair seminars from China to Mumbai, and has world-wide academies where he teaches his approach. He’s the only global hairdressing brand.

Ferretti has more USPs than you’ll find in 16 alphabets. He devised and patented The Method, a unique technique for cutting hair (about which, more later). He has created and patented a special pair of scissors: texturising ones, that snip a delicate 18 per cent instead of the habitual 30.

He claims to have invented the Invisible Cut (full of layers, but you don’t see them). And, along with ace colourist Carl Dawson (who does Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Gwyneth), is developing a unique hair colouring procedure (watch this space).

The Rossano Ferretti Hairspa experience
But is this all the Emperor’s New Clothes? Are we talking nothing more than clever marketing and gimmickry?

I decide to put my tresses to the test. The Rossano Ferretti Hairspa (all 5,500 square foot of it for just 14 hair stations) is in a four-storey, Georgian townhouse in Mayfair’s St George Street.

A good-looking, besuited doorman spirits me up the sweeping staircase beneath the bespoke Fabergé black glass chandelier. Upstairs there are black floorboards, hair products displayed in antique frames and a 1936 perm machine that belonged to Ferretti’s grandparents. (He is a third generation hairdresser.)

There are no mirrors; another first. Women, he believes, shouldn’t suffer seeing themselves in transition.

And there’s no thudding music. Even the noise of hair dryers is kept to a separate room. Forget hairspa. This is a hair temple.

The Method: a hair innovation
Ferretti appears in a jacket, waistcoat and patterned scarf. (Like the children of the cobbler who has no shoes, he’s bald.) He is stylish, charming and solicitous. He takes my hair in his hands and tuts: “Whoever did this, sorry. This is not the right job for them.” (It was one of the guys at Nicky Clarke’s, actually.)

Then he sprays my hair with essence of unicorn’s tears before taking out his diamond-encrusted platinum scissors. Not really. What he actually does is pick up strands of my hair, let go of them and, as they are falling, snip away. Cutting the hair in motion. The Method.

As he works, we chat about his earlier life, working on catwalk shows for Armani, St Laurent and Dior, and shoots with Richard Avedon. Ferretti started in the trade at 14.

Now he jets from LA (“hair colour city”) to New York (“all about blond and blow out”) to London (“volume and bounce.”)

He did Jennifer Lawrence’s, Kate Hudson’s and Reese Witherspoon’s hair for the Oscars. His has been a meteoric rise from humble beginnings. But how does he justify his charges?

“Quality,” he says. “In the USA people happily pay for it. It’s different in Europe.”

It’s true that Nicky Clarke and Paul Edmonds charge £500 for new clients. But across the Atlantic, Frederic Fekkai, Sally Hershberger and Gibson cost $750, $850 and $950.

“The truth is, I don’t want clients. I’m too busy. I have a brilliant team for doing haircuts.”

As the Italian hairdresser della celebrita cuts my hair, he zeroes in on the way it falls, its structure and texture, rather than forcing it into an unnatural shape.

“The scissors don’t do the haircut, they’re an elongation of my hands,” says Rossano Scissorhands, swooping and curving his body as he works. “I move myself around the hair, not stand there like a stone.”

Hmmm. But doesn’t any halfway decent stylist take note of the natural movement and structure of the hair? And as for the scissors with gaps, aren’t they really just thinning scissors?

He stops and contemplates. “Hair grows vertically and with The Method technique, I cut it holding the scissors vertically, not horizontally,” he replies. “In this way, we achieve a natural movement of the hair which is not geometric or box-like.”

And the scissors? “Usually thinning ones have two blades with teeth. But The Method texturising ones have one plain blade and the other with teeth…” (See a photo gallery on Ferretti’s site.)

Was it worth it?
He takes three inches off my hair. It’s far more than I’d have suggested, though I had told him to do whatever he wanted. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? You don’t go around telling £200–a-second brain surgeons how to work. Fifteen minutes later Ferretti is finished. (OK, a mere £67 a minute.)

The results are fantastic. A sort of bob de nos jours. Full of life. Natural. Flattering. Afterwards friends comment that they’ve never seen my hair looking so good; and my children say it looks professionally blow-dried, permanently.

Crucially, it looks just as good when I wash and go myself. It’s grown-up hair. Hair the way it’s meant to look, not following trends or forced to do things that it doesn’t want to do. Hair that has self -assurance.

When it grows out
But there’s a problem with the haircut: it grows. And I don’t have £1,000 for another. So two months later I take a photo of my original Ferretti-ed head to my local salon and say, “Copy that, please.”

Now I’m not stupid. Granted my local is not a hairspa, but it’s not just any old salon.

It’s owned by a famed snipper, who’s no slouch himself. In his day, he’s done TV presenters and pop stars. And he has a nice view of the railway line. So it should be a bit like taking a designer dress to be copied in India. And I’ve done that a few times.

Anyway, he says “no problem” and chops away. But maybe it’s because his scissors thin by 30 per cent, maybe it’s because he cuts horizontally, but whatever it is, I end up looking like Richard III. And weeping. And £70 poorer.

This means that, just 24 hours later, I find myself paying to have my hair cut – again. This time, the hairdresser, the beautiful Pol Garcia, snips elegantly. He cuts my hair as it falls. He does yoga-style bends around my body. The result has volume, bounce and elegance. It costs £150.

Ah! Did I tell you that he cuts Pippa Middleton’s hair? Oh, and that he works at the Rossano Ferretti Hairspa? Ferretti has a talented team who offer his cuts at a snip of the price.

I’m sold on The Method. One of these days I’d love to have another cut by Ferretti. After all, it only costs 1.4p a follicle.

It appeals to me when I arrive at Grayshott Spa and know from the minute I walk into the entrance hall that I can wear a white robe from now on. ‘You don’t have to worry about labels on your tracksuit or whether you have the correct evening clothes. Just bring trackies and robust walking boots’, was all Vicki Edgson, nutritionist, global spa retreat leader and health consultant, had insisted. ‘The rest of the time, you probably won’t even get out of your dressing gown’. And yes, there is a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest aspect to the grande dame of spas with its fifty-somethings padding around in slippers and white robes.

Grayshott is under an hour from London and suddenly I am in utter peace and tranquillity and the former country seat of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Welcome to Comfort Central with Surrey bourgeois décor trying to go modern, gigantic double beds (or two in one football-stadium-sized room), lots of candles, an apple orchard, sauna and comforting middle-aged matrons in white coats.

There’s a cigar room turned bar with a water menu from around the world (and wine); and a billiards room that has morphed into a cinema with pink walls, where they also hold lectures on everything from how to dress to life coaching.

I’m here for a ‘Vital Health – Weight Management’ retreat with Vicki. It’s normally a seven-day retreat, but I plan to do it in two and a half days (but only because I’m on a press trip that doesn’t last longer). Vicki starts from the position that people eat too much and of the wrong things and at the wrong times of the day, which is hardly reinventing the wheel. But this turns out to be not your bog-standard detoxing retreat. She looks at key factors essential for long-lasting, sustainable, empowering energy – known as the Vital Force in Eastern Medicine.

There are eight of us, including two women who have done an extreme diet and lost seven stone between them. We start our retreat in the traditional dining room with a group chat over a plated supper that wouldn’t stretch the stomach of a Chihuahua dog. There’s no going back for seconds; in fact, adding pepper would probably tip the balance into what’s considered over-eating here.

But the food is healthy and terribly good (think grilled fish and saffron gnocchi) and all the better for being eaten after a digestive enzyme tablet, apparently. Plus the accompanying basil water has anti-bacterial qualities. ‘Would you like water or water?’ asks the waitress, offering herb-infused aqua or Grayshott’s own brand. ‘You should be running to the loo every half hour,’ warns Vicki, cheerily.

Vicki tells us that the next few days will be filled with plenty of outdoor cardiovascular exercise, gym circuit class, fresh air, sleep and treatments to help to ‘up-regulate the metabolism,’ (nutritionist speak for fat-burning.) This is to be interspersed with stuff to calm the nerves – mind-relaxing T’ai Chi, Chi Gung, yoga and suchlike – to prepare us for ‘proper, restorative’ sleep.

In between, we will be meeting for three meals a day – breakfast being the largest, lunch being of the help yourself variety, (don’t get excited: they give you a teeny Grayshott plate with coloured stripes denoting how much each of protein, carbs and greens you can have,) and supper the lightest, (think a palm-sized portion).

We will also be knocking back our body fluid ratio in herbal teas: cayenne pepper and lemon in the morning to stimulate liver and cleansing; turmeric (if you want something that tastes like a half-washed take-away curry container); Japanese Hojicha tea for balancing the stress hormones (known as an adaptogen, as needed by the adrenal glands); and Harmonise tea instead of Mogadon.

We are up early for a racy walk around what feels like most of the 700 autumnal acres of National Trust land that backs onto Grayshott’s 47 acres. It’s exhilarating. Then there’s a jam-packed schedule. It’s not faddish, essentially English and does what matters incredibly well. The therapists are unrivalled (one was a masseur here for 40 years; and most of them have worked here for more than 20 years) and the treatments range from beautifying treats to Hopi Ear Candling and food intolerance analysis. But we follow Vicki’s directives when it comes to treatments; when it comes to everything, in fact.

I have a Body Composition Analysis with Ravi (a personal trainer and International and World Cup hockey player) who promises I’ll get taller afterwards (it’s something to do with tightening my muscles, if I remember correctly). He measures my water, protein, fat and mineral content. Then I have an Oriental Wisdom with Catherine which is unique to Grayshott and one of the best massages I’ve ever had. It incorporates Tui-na massage, Shiatsu, oils with Chinese herbs and a bit of magic.

There’s my back massage with Pam from Bradford who delights me as much with her talents honed over decades as her tales of when she was a Young Communist. And the body scrub where I’m slavered in algae and wrapped in plastic like a demented fish roll. We also do a walking mediation, wandering the beautiful grounds together in silence. ‘I don’t mind if you hug a tree,’ laughs our guide Faye, who oozes spirituality and has worked in hospices. It’s the staff who make Grayshot: they’re friendly, helpful and make me feel so mothered.

We spend much of our time with Vicki, a friendly hurricane with boundless energy and a TV presenter’s presentation. She’s also a numero uno exhibit of the glow, pert bum and cheery disposition that comes from fitness, good food and a positive attitude to life. ‘We all have a choice about our own wellbeing,’ she says. Later she asks us to think about what we’d do if we had two hours to ourselves every day. It may be boring that I say I’d like to read but it makes me decide to implement changes in my life.

Over our time together, Vicki proves that eating more slowly, (she terms this ‘conscious eating’ but really it’s masticating and not nearly as much fun as it’s semiotic cousin); selecting the right balance of foods for each individual (she suggests I miss out sugar and caffeine); and addressing eating issues, (show me a woman who doesn’t have any, and I’ll show you a liar) are key to changing our attitude to our appearance and weight. Each of us in the group has specific difficulties that need to be addressed, and Vicki works with forensic focus to ensure that we all have our own plan by the time we leave. Mine includes vitamin recommendations and a visit to Dr Marion Gluck, London’s hormonal health guru and one of the country’s leading holistic doctors.

The group dynamic is vital for the success of this type of retreat. ‘You may not want to sit down to yet another meal with everyone here every day,’ says Vicki. But, surprisingly, eating together is a hoot. Even more surprisingly I feel full after the food that we’re given. We learn a lot about nutrition and listening to other women’s problems around their food habits and addictions is enlightening. ‘It’s a sharing and caring atmosphere, with much laughter and empathy, isn’t it?’ says Vicki. I leave with a smile on my lips, a bounce in my step, a little less lardy and feeling totally refreshed. Even my lingering cold stays behind in Surrey.

If you’re the type who has tons of clothes but never anything to wear, read on. Once we Brits thought that professional style advice was best left to our Transatlantic cousins. We legged it in department stores at the sight of consultants wearing knee-high foundation and extreme designer clothes: reincarnated Stepford Wives telling us which colours and styles of clothes (and makeup) to wear.

We preferred instead to be amateurish in our garment purchases – either going for DIY or stupidly relying on shop assistants to give us honest, objective advice. (Hello, who’s on commission here?)

Either way, all too often we ended up with expensive and uncoordinated items. Impulse buys and age inappropriate clothes. Rubbish sales purchases. And clothes that will fit one day, honest.

Now Notting Hillybillies, sharp investors and slebs are turning to professional help. “Personal stylists have gone big,” confirms Fiona Golfar, editor at large of British Vogue. More specifically, they’re hiring stylist Annabel Hodin to help them make their sartorial choices. She’s an erstwhile model – she was talent spotted by US Vogue’s Anna Wintour – and is the fashion editors’ favourite.

There’s scarcely a glossy magazine editor or newspaper fashionista who hasn’t sought her help. After all, the girl has pedigree: she has created looks for Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry, styling their photo shoots. And the same for Helena Bonham Carter, Rachel Weisz and Mariella Frostrup.

Annabel offers a bespoke service that includes consultations, wardrobe edits, shopping trips and follow ups in person and/or on the phone. Initially she comes to your house or office – the latter for a consultation, ideal for those who feel shy about a lady going through their drawers within an hour of meeting. If she’s doing a home visit, you’d best wear good underwear – you’ll be trying on clothes.

With refreshing frankness and energy, she’ll go through your wardrobe –and with you, she’ll select looks that work for you, find gaps in your closet, identify what you think you want and need and discuss what she reckons would work. Yep, time to chuck the vintage if you’re old enough to have worn it first time round.

After her efficient edit, you’ll have a leaner wardrobe. (Mine was positively slimline.) Then she’ll put your clothes into outfits to see what’s missing, and together you’ll set out to fill them. So now to shopping! Yipee! She has already scoured the shops for weeks prior to meeting you, understands what suits you probably better than you know yourself, and knows where to find everything….whether it be designer or high street. She’ll whizz you through West London’s stylish boutiques and on to Selfridges or perhaps to St John’s Wood High Street’s Joseph – which has clothes not carried elsewhere – for core items. And all done with military precision and a brilliant eye.

Annabel helps you buy key pieces that will last: simple, timeless cuts. She avoids cheap fabrics, cuts and colours. She goes for multiple buys if it’s a vital core item. (Genius. It never occurred to me to buy more than one of something that suits me. “It saves one for best,” she says. “If it’s a classic, you can have it in more than one colour.”) She discourages shopping in the sales. “Only if you already know it’s the right size and colour.” And when you’re all alone and that shopping urge comes upon you, she recommends that you, “Only go where they’ll reimburse!”

Having an appointment with Annabel may be the some of the best money you’ve ever spent. It was for me. When I sold my ‘rejects’ to a second hand dress agency, I made more money than she charges for a consultation. Oh, and she gave me top tips on everything from beauty, my hair cut and colour to personal trainers. Friends keep telling me how good I look. For the first time in my life, I have a capsule wardrobe that works and can be updated (inexpensively) with accessories. For the first time ever, I can’t say that the only clothes I like are the ones I’m about to buy…