Durban - Every week, it was the first question asked on my family Zoom call.
“Robert, what are you going to do about your hair?”
My husband has hair long and curly enough that a man we didn’t know recently stopped us on a hike. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. When we remarked on his extraordinary recall, he laughed and pointed to my husband’s head: “Hard to forget.”
On a good day, Robert’s hair spirals into silky ringlets. But lately there have been fewer good days. I’ve been begging him to let me cut it for more than a month. I promised to take it seriously, to watch hours of YouTube videos in preparation. But even as the situation became urgent - he’s in the process of interviewing for his dream job over Zoom - he still refused to let me loose on his curls. For as long as hair salons remained closed, he said, he’d wait.
Couples everywhere are experiencing this situation.
There’s a lot at stake when you allow someone else to cut your hair, says Mercedes Ortiz-Olivieri, who owns Trim Hair Salon in Washington, US, which offers virtual hair tutorials. A bad haircut can be a deeply distressing event, she says, often impacting self-esteem. It’s not easy to close your eyes and hand someone clippers or a pair of scissors - even if you’d trust that someone with pretty much anything else.
“There is just such a huge amount of trust built into the relationship you have with your stylist or barber,” said Ortiz-Olivieri.
Of course you trust
your partner, she said - “just maybe not with
this one thing”.
There is an assumption that men “shouldn’t” care about their hair as much as women do, said Ortiz-Olivieri. In the 25 years that she’s been cutting hair, she’s found that assumption to be false. If anything, she said, her male clients worry about their hair more than her female clients do.
Paolo Sison was nervous. He set up his own hair-cutting station outside his parents’ apartment in Manila, Philippines. He plugged a few kinds of razors into the extension cord and draped a tarp over his boyfriend’s shoulders. Right before he made the first cut, Sison said a silent prayer.
“I was like, ‘Dear God, please don’t let this be the end of this two-year relationship’.” His boyfriend wasn’t vain, Sison said, but “his hair is really important to him”.
When Vincent agreed to the haircut, Sison said, it was a “romantic moment”. He knew that it meant something: no one besides Vincent’s regular barber had cut his hair in five years.
“If someone were to propose to you - the feeling you’d get,” Sison said. “It felt something like that.”
The haircut was going according to plan, Sison said - “until the injury”. The bulk of the work was done. Sison just wanted to “clean things up” around the edges. He was trying to get a few strands of hair between the razor blades, he said, but he didn’t notice that he’d nicked the corner of Vincent’s ear, until the blood flowed. It took a few hours for the bleeding to subside, he said: The ear, as his father - a doctor - was quick to tell him, is a “natural bleeder”. Fortunately Vincent was calm and forgiving. And his hair looked great. - Washington Post