The Haircut

Thoughts from the barber's chair

A barber cutting a man's hair (1568). Woodcut by Jost Amman, 1539–1591. Wellcome Collection. It would seem the experience of a haircut hasn’t much changed in 500 years.

At my hairdresser’s in Tokyo the other day, I glanced down and noted once again that the hair that used to fall blond as straw and then in light brown clusters is now blended with grey. It’s been that way for years.

But it made me reflect on how I could almost measure out my life via the colour of my hair falling on distant floors in the countries I’ve lived in.

Me, aged 7 or 8, with my then-blond hair

*****

At a hairdresser’s, the lack of the right words has sometimes been a problem for me. I might be able to order dinner in Japanese or even quote a few lines from a classic work of Chinese literature. But could I ask the hairdresser to make sure my hair didn’t stick up too much? ¹

But I confess, there are benefits to my linguistic limitations. Hairdressers worldwide seem as eager to chat as those in England. And for me, their well-intentioned professional patter is the worst kind of small talk, invasive at a moment of almost intimate contact, and perpetrated when you are a captive audience. 

In the right context, I enjoy hearing people’s stories. Or even telling my own. But being forced to respond to such classics as “going anywhere nice on your holidays?” is almost more than I can bear. 

Living in Japan, China, or Turkey, I’ve generally been able to hide behind my lack of language and stay silent. And in Spain, I once found myself pretending I didn’t know Spanish to avoid being subjected to my hairdresser’s attempts to break the silence. 

Only once, in the aftermath of an unwise 15-minute cheap cut in Valencia, did I welcome the input of the shocked and amused London hairdresser who I visited a couple of weeks later. His “Who on earth cut your hair last time?” jolted me into a confessional disclosure, and I gratefully accepted his admonitions and even engaged in conversation to seek absolution for my sins.

*****

Undisturbed in the hairdresser’s chair in Tokyo, I wondered what poetry there might be about haircuts. I searched when I got home. But what came up was mostly about hair and was less an anthology than a catalogue of male objectification of the female body and the concomitant desire to possess it.

I should have known: pursuit of a lock of a woman’s hair was a common trope for centuries. I’m a big fan of Alexander Pope, but the title of his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock—a poem I admire but also find hard to enjoy—makes the sinister creepiness of all this explicit, even if “rape” is not used here in a directly sexual sense.² There was nothing for me among such poems. 

So I was delighted to come across Cutting Hair, a warm, humane poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt that focuses on the life and work of her hairdresser:

It’s a good living, kind of like an undertaker,

the people keep coming, and the hair, shoulder length, French

twist, braids.   Someone has to cut it.

*****

It’s a good living. 

In the UK, there are around 61,000 hair and beauty businesses, employing perhaps 200,000 people, 60% of whom are self-employed.

86% of UK hairdressers are women. 

This summer in England, I stopped for a couple of hours in the tiny Cotswold town of Malmesbury to see the 12th-century abbey. Strolling towards my destination, I passed what appeared to be a newly-opened Turkish barbershop. I thought back to the noisy but efficient barber’s I used to go to in Ankara, where endless finger-scalding glasses of çay were served). I lived in Turkey for four years, and I can’t recall seeing a single female hairdresser. 

****

Someone has to cut it

As my mind wandered further from my hairdresser’s chair in Tokyo, I recalled the hair salon I went to in Cairo. Catering for wealthy locals as well as foreigners, it was anonymously accommodated on the 2nd floor of an unremarkable walk-up not far from my flat in Zamalek.

The first time I pushed open the signless door that gave on to an otherwise empty corridor, I was surprised to find the place very busy, though in a peculiarly hushed way. My barber, immense, bearded, and friendly, with a good smattering of English and French, proved to be a good judge of character and tactfully left me to my thoughts. His scissors would snip gently around my head like insistent metal insects, and I would drift off into my weekend thoughts.

Before leaving, I’d do as I’d seen others do and stuff a small wad of Egyptian pounds into the breast pocket of the young man who’d washed my hair and brushed away the motley loam of brown and grey cuttings.

****

kind of like an undertaker

As I felt my hair fall around me in the Tokyo hairdresser’s, I wondered how long before it would be all grey or white. 

Minnie Bruce Pratt writes beautifully of her fallen hair:

curls and clippings of brown and silver,

how it shines like a field of scythed hay beneath my feet.

And George Eliot had similarly seasonal thoughts: 

'Mid my gold-brown curls

        There twined a silver hair:

    I plucked it idly out

    And scarcely knew 'twas there.

    Coiled in my velvet sleeve it lay

    And like a serpent hissed:

    "Me thou canst pluck & fling away,

        One hair is lightly missed;

    But how on that near day

  When all the wintry army muster in array?"

My own “wintry army” has not yet assembled. 

But leaning back in my Tokyo hairdresser’s chair, I caught my own eye in the mirror in front of me. I almost attained a look of nonchalant detachment while the grey hairs kept falling like the first drops of a summer storm, somewhere just out of sight.

1. Answer: Of course not.

2. But from this link, it's clear that this has been one of the meanings of the word since the 15th century, centuries before Pope was born.