Haircut

Trusting a stranger is never easy. No businessman would expect to do a deal without building some level of rapport with the client, and why would anyone else be willing to throw their faith at someone they have no previous knowledge of. Apart from…

The hairdresser has a surprising amount of trust placed in them when you sit in the chair and have your cape draped over you, preparing yourself to stare at your ever-changing reflection for the next 40-odd minutes. Once you have committed yourself to this compromising position, this man (let’s go with a man for the sake of brevity) has a frightening amount of influence over your appearance, your image, your happiness over the coming weeks and months. In short, they control what you look like. This in turn controls what people think of you when they see you, which is turn controls how much they like you, and determines your entire future relationship with that person. In short, the hairdresser literally holds your life in his hands. Think I’m exaggerating? Take a moment to think about how closely he holds a pair of scissors to various essential arteries and your general face area. 

You may think it vital to give this man precise instructions in order to get your hair as closely to what you want as you hope, i.e. damage limitation. It’s going to be awful, it’s going to look weird, so best to get it to look as not awful and not weird as you can salvage. Your instructions you give him are vital! What do you want done? In an ideal world, you would want to be able to control the exact length and direction of each individual hair, to avoid the disaster of coming looking like you’ve been wrongly processed by a blind farmer during the sheep-sheering season. How would you like it? It’s an important question. Which only goes to emphasise how careless I am with the same answer I give every time. I’d like it shorter please!

Here’s a question. When the barber shows you the back of your head, has there ever been any thought that crosses a person’s mind that isn’t, “Ooo, so that’s what I look like from the back”?