For the first time yesterday I watched a woman getting her hair cut and styled. Yeah despite having been earning MBA salaries for the better part of the last four years I’ve never really ventured into the “unisex salon” space and have always stuck to the neighbourhood hajaam such as the Noble Men’s Parlour at the end of my road. Till recently there was really no one to accompany so I had been deprived of watching this extremely interesting activity.
Yesterday I accompanied Priyanka to Bounce, supposedly one of “stylier” salons in the city, where she got her hair cut and styled. I had taken appointment by phone earlier in the day and hence there wasn’t much time we had to spend there reading Stardust or Filmfare (which I invariably do at Noble’s since there’s always a long line there). The whole process took about an hour and the distribution of various activities in this hour was extremely different from what I experience at Noble. Ok I must point out again that this is the only data point I have with respect to women’s hair cutting and am extrapolating based on that.
In the whole process, less than five minutes went into the actual cutting of hair, with the initial ten-fifteen minutes spent in washing the hair and the last half in blow-drying and setting the hair. Another thing I noticed was that the hair was mostly wet when it was being cut, while the local mens’ salons usually just spray a little bit of water before cutting.
Actually I realize that this analysis is futile since there are two large factors that separate the two situations that I’m comparing here – and a more complete analysis will be possible only when I observe men’s haircuts at high-end salons – that way I can compare differences in procedure based on sex and also based on kind of salon. Currently, however, I don’t think I’m really ready for splurging that kind of money on a haircut so that analysis has to wait. And yeah, I did observe several men getting their hair cut at Bounce yesterday, but then didn’t observe any of them close enough to come up with any valid data points.
Then I noticed that several barbers at Bounce themselves had really unusual haircuts. This reminds me of this old joke (also there in the classic Anantnag starrer Gowri Ganesha ). If there are two barbers with shops next to each others’ and one of the barbers has a haircut like Amitabh while the other has horrible hair, who will you go to if you want your hair to be like Amitabh’s?