Working at Beauty Express, it has been my experience that the customers are more concerned with express than beauty, but the lady that came it yesterday was in a category all her own.
She asked to have all of her hair shaved off. It was some kind of ritual, right of passage, self-dare thing she was doing. She said she was celebrating her divorce becoming final, and that the hair held unpleasant history and wanted to be free of it.
“Shaved, as in all gone, shaved?” I asked, hoping I had misunderstood.
“Yep. I want to be bald as a baby. Go for it.”
I was more nervous than she was. I don’t know how to describe her, not nervous, maybe giddy, confident but with some psycho thrown in. I couldn’t believe she was really asking me to take every single bit of hair off her head. It was the highest risk haircut I had ever done. It’s one thing to change a person’s hairstyle and risk them hating it, but cutting everything off…slow down, let’s think about this for a minute. If a person isn’t crazy about a haircut I give them, well, that happens, but a shaved head, that’s gonna take a long time to grow out.
To stall, I suggested just a little cosmetics, brow, lip and cheek color, before we started. I could see she wasn’t much for make-up, and I was very concerned that a bland head and a bland face would end in tears for the daring divorcé. Thankfully, she was game. I used every bit of self-control to prevent my hands from shaking as I applied the cream and powders. I had barely finished dabbing on the make-up when she jerked her head away from my hand and creased her forehead into a frightening scowl.
“No more,” she barked as she inspected what I had just done.
“O.K.” I replied calmly and casually, controlling any hint of quiver in my voice, although her words were like ice water down my back.
The moment of no return had come; I had to start shaving her head. Her thin, drab blonde, mid-back length hair was loosely gathered together at the base of her neck with a faded red office supply rubber band, not exactly the height of fashion. With my very sharp scissors, I cut the ponytail off in one dramatic whack. If that wasn’t enough to scare her out of her plan, then I had to assume she was serious about losing all of her hair, and I had to proceed. She didn’t flinch. I fired up my electric clipper; of course it’s not as loud as a chain saw, but it has a similarly menacing note. An electric buzzer doesn’t need time to warm up, but I held it for a moment, giving her one more chance to change her mind. It didn’t happen. I dug in, raking the clipper across her head in forehead to nape rows, like cutting grass.
She had taken the lopped off ponytail from me and was playing with it as I went along, tickling her face and rolling it into a ball that she tossed from one hand to the other. Like a child playing with a toy, she made humming sounds from her throat and was enthralled.
The final part of the cut was to clean off the buzzed stubble with a men’s electric face shaver. There was no way I could have done that part with a straight-edged razor the way barbers do; my hands were shaking as if the room had gone sub-zero. When everything was done, to my surprise, she liked it; we both did. She looked good. In fact, she looked fabulous. I was incredibly pleased with myself. She had a well-shaped head, small ears with small turquoise earrings in them, nice cheekbones, and soft hazel eyes, all of which I had missed the hour before. She stood up from my chair transformed; head high, she was positively regal, like an ancient warrior goddess. I could tell she was pleased, even though she wasn’t saying much, because she paid the twenty-dollar bill and then tipped me twenty.
Not a typical Beauty Express customer.
Have a terrific week everybody, and I’ll post again next Friday.