Rationally, I know what you've said to be the truth.
In reality, I cut my own hair because it stresses me out to go to a Greatclips.
In reality, I cut my own hair because it stresses me out to go to a Greatclips.
I have been going to a fancy hair place in recent years. AUD $85 seems like a lot of money for a mens haircut, but it makes all the difference. It's a proper craft. No "what haircut would you like?", instead it's pretty much at her discretion and suited to the actual person. Zero regrets.
I used to cut at a Supercuts in PHL (the Rodin place one for those in the know) and there was this great lady there that was both very skillful and incredibly nice, we always had great conversations.
I wholeheartedly agree. In my mind it's fancy because it's expensive. It's not the high society designer fashion nose high kind of fancy. More boutique :)
- 90% of male barbers are butchers
- clippers are for butchers
- anyone who tries to cut your hair without washing it first is probably a butcher
IMO thick or curly hair is always best cut dry and washed after. The hair changes way too much when wet to get a realistic idea of what it will look like when done if you wash it first. If time and patience were infinite, sure, maybe, wash and treat curly hair first, but it has to then be fully dry and it has to dry slowly without blowdrying before cutting because it completely changes shape and size between wet and dry.
I'm not PP but I'm a dude with long, curly hair and I just want an even trim, so it's much better if my hair is wet.
(Also, shampoo is harder on curly hair than straight hair; "wash" curly hair with water every day and use some conditioner, and only use shampoo if it feels dirty. That may only be once week or two, maybe once a month if the hair is short. Yes, really.)
If you're just looking for an even trim, then almost anyone should be able to do it. (And I usually clean my hair right before I go in.)
"I'd like layers. I don't want an undercut or fade. Here's a photo." "You got it." --> Undercut.
These days I do neither. When the pandemic hit and people were socially distancing, my wife tried giving me a haircut, which wasn’t great but also wasn’t terrible. So we bought a hair trimming kit, watched a few YouTube videos and after a couple attempts she got pretty good at cutting my hair. She is by no means a proper barber, but she also only has a single client, me, so she doesn’t need to become great at cutting hair, we are just fine if she gets good at cutting my hair. And she has. I think the results are at least as good as any barber (and more consistent), and we now aren’t spending half a thousand dollars a year on cutting my hair. Obviously that isn’t a situation that will work for everyone, but I definitely recommend exploring it for those it does.
Whenever I go to a new city what I do is, I read up a ton of reviews from multiple sources and find a few barbers I think ill like. Then I go for a quick trim to understand how comfortable I feel around them (this is the hardest part, I usually explain to them about my anxiety before I make a booking except for one instance everyone is really understanding usually), I have been lucky enough to find someone good after trying 2-3 barbers.
My current barber is an awesome older gentleman from Iran who migrated to the same city as I am, knows my exact haircut I want, so all I have to do is show up on time and get a great stress free haircut, and get to hear some really interesting story from him. lol if I go out of the city for a while, I wont mind looking like an escaped lunatic for a few days extra until I come back home.
Now days I don't care as much and just do my own with the clippers and save myself $40. Can you believe a hair cut at the barber costs $40 now here in Australia. You know you are getting old when everything seems shockingly expensive.
Or conversely you have vivid memories of how quickly the AUD, or USD or any fiat currency really has been so immensely rapidly inflated in the last 20 years; hell just in the last 3 years its been from tolerable to eye watering to get a haircut. I like my barber, she is the head stylist-owner and I don't mind paying nearly $50 (with tip), but that is also because she does such a good job and we talk shop and what good restaurants still exist. It's also that I can trim it on my own for a month later to keep my sculpted hair style in a customer facing role for that cost.
I used to get a haircut twice a month when I was in HS, and they were $10, because it gave me a place where I could hang out on the weekend and chat for a few hours. I also realized I had developed a taste for aged and smoked whisky at 15 despite hating the smell of cigarettes in that place.
I have several size clippers with all the accessories and while I played around with the idea of doing my own hair, as I had during COVID, the truth is I'd rather pay a pro for something that I don't have to much to look good. Mine always were passable from about 7 feet away kind of things because I can't properly fade, mine always look like I'm 3 weeks from my last haircut as a result.
I actually think the last 20 years have had remarkably little inflation in the grand scheme of things, compared to the last 100 years, at least in the UK.
I first got interested in this just under 20 years ago when my mum said that my grandma's first house cost exactly £100, and at the time the property market was towards the end of a massive boom (and then was stagnant for about the next 10 years). At the time, her £100 house would have been worth somewhere around £100k, which got me thinking to how crazy that it could have increased a thousand fold. Looking at UK historical inflation rates, it was interesting that from 1900 until the mid 1980s, inflation was pretty constant at around 7% per year, which has the interesting side effect that when compounded, prices approximately double every decade.
Obviously, my data points are skewed towards the UK, but I suspect the US and Europe at least experienced similar effects, because of the ease of international trade, so any imbalances would be rapidly exploited by the market until they equalised. However, one data point I have from the US, which is a bit fuzzy in my recollection so it might be slightly off, was from reading Grapes of Wrath set in the 1930s Great Depression. IIRC the daily salary for a long day picking cotton was around 20 cents, so maybe the specific inflection points in the US timeline were different, but it seems to have followed a similar long-term inflation pattern when considered over several decades.
Things got weird in the UK, as the mid-late 80s had some unprecedented high inflation rates (I remember my parents paying 12% interest on our house at the time), followed by very low inflation for about a decade (the UK government was targetting 2%), which led to a lot of surplus money around, easy borrowing for industry, and ultimately a massive rise in house prices in the early 2000s (and I was interested then because I was trying to buy my first home, and for example where I was looking house prices rose 50% in 2003 alone). Since then, we've had unprecedentedly low interest rates (nearly zero) leading to quite low inflation for a couple of decades.
What's interesting now though is that people are seeing "high" interest rates of 5% and panicking because younger buyers now have only ever experienced relatively low interest and inflation rates, but actually if you consider a longer time frame, the last 20 years with its sudden inflation spurt then prolonged price stagnation and now "high" inflation again, it's probably on average bringing us back to that average of 7% that we saw over a longer period.
Another thing that's really interesting is when and why inflation started happening, sometime around the 15th and 16th centuries, when people started speculatively investing in companies. Prior to that, prices of commodities and housing had been rather static for quite a few centuries.
There are lots of fascinating articles online about medieval prices, e.g. https://blog.datawrapper.de/medieval-prices-wages/