Could silence be the new small talk at the hairdressers?
From holiday plans to relationship problems, conversations with a hair stylist are considered as much an integral part of the salon experience as a shampoo and a blow dry, so much so that hairdressers have come to be nicknamed ‘hairapists’.
A British survey found 55% of hairdresser chats to be about holidays, 30% to be about family life, 26% to be about work stress, and 21% about medical issues. Though generally not part of hairdressing courses, programmes aimed at helping salon workers talk about more delicate issues with clients are on the rise. The Hairdressers Journal compares the hairdresser chair to a “confessional booth”.
However, a new trend is emerging in salons around the world. And that trend is one of blissful silence.
Speaking to the Guardian, hairdresser Ash Boughton who runs AB Colour in Sydney’s Surrey Hills, says that the constant talk of the pandemic had a negative effect on the ambiance of the salon, and now “the need for calmer experiences has become essential”.
“To think we can go from lockdown to how were before the pandemic just isn’t rational thinking,” Rosie Fraser, owner of That Rosie Glow in the UK, tells Professional Beauty. “This option makes it obvious to the professional whether the client wants to engage in conversation or not.” However, she has noticed that around half of those who book silent treatments end up initiating conversation anyway, feeling “comfortable knowing the pressure is taken away”.
KG Salon launched its Quiet Time initiative in 2021 to coincide with mental Health Awareness Week and continued as it was so popular with a 10% increase in clients choosing it. Instagram polls by London-based mobile beauty business Go Star revealed that 87% of its clients would have been reluctant to ask for a silent treatment before they knew it was available; then 62% were keen. Owner Xhanan Goleshi says silent treatments now account for 10% of her business.
“…a safe place for you to get some peace and quiet, reflect and take time for silent self-care”.
Here in Auckland, Craig Gullet, co-owner of Salon 1925 introduced silent treatments just after the first lockdown “to give people anxious because of Covid or just worn out the assurance that their time would be relaxing”. Wellington’s Miss Fox website promises staff can “zip it up while you get some well-deserved Zen”, while the capital’s Powder Room offers “a safe place for you to get some peace and quiet, reflect and take time for silent self-care”.
Though the pandemic may have accelerated it, the practice was gaining ground way before ‘masks’ and ‘covid’ entered our everyday lexicon. In 2019, Sophie Hilton, owner of Not Another Salon, in London, told the Independent that she was introducing silent appointment options to help out with mental health. “I knew that to truly be inclusive we needed to stop clients feeling embarrassed about their individual needs,” she said. “Because of our no judgment policy we also get a lot of people with mental health issues who might not feel that they want to talk about themselves.” She added that it helped the staff just as much as it did the clients because although her team “love a chat… they also love calm time too”.
In Cardiff, the Bauhaus salons may have been the first – in Britain at least – to provide a “quiet chair”, back in 2015, but the treatment goes back even further than that. Philogelos, dated around the fourth century AD and written in Ancient Greek, is the oldest known collection of jokes. One, entry, attributed to Plutarch, tells of how a “garrulous barber” once asked the King of Macedonia, Archelaus I, how he’d like to be trimmed.
The king answered, “In silence.”
