Are hair salons safe to go back?
CUSTOMERS CLAMOUR TO FIX GREY ROOTS, SHAGGY BEARDS AND CHIPPED NAILS AFTER MONTHS OF LOCKDOWN
Few professional encounters require prolonged bouts of close contact like appointments at hair or beauty salons. This makes beauty, nail and barbershops potentially high-risk hubs of infection for the coronavirus, which has killed almost half a million people worldwide since the start of this year.
And yet, across the United States, customers are clamouring to fix grey roots, shaggy beards and chipped nails in reopened salons after months in lockdown, despite stark changes to how these services can now be offered. How do you cut hair behind someone’s ears when they’re also wearing a mask? Doesn’t matter, people are doing it.
According to data from Safegraph, a data firm that determines which businesses people visit by tracking aggregated and anonymised cell phone data, foot traffic to hair and beauty salons and barbershops dropped nationwide by 60 per cent mid-April.
But by the start of June, as some states started to lift stayat-home orders, traffic to those salons was just 30 per cent lower than a year ago. (Safegraph and other companies that collect mobile phone locations have been criticised over privacy concerns, as location data is often sold to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behaviour).
The data can’t fully capture where all Americans are going. Safegraph monitors foot traffic data by tracking GPS pings from cell phones inside generated building shapes that have been created with North American Industry Classification System codes. (This is the standard used by federal statistical agencies to classify businesses for collecting and analysing data related to the nation’s business economy).
But people who don’t carry phones or who disallow tracking are not counted in these data sets.
And, there’s no way to measure who is getting haircuts on the sly, or in a location that isn’t officially classed as a salon. Anecdotal reports of such activity are very high.
In some states, including Nevada (for hair salons) and Montana and Mississippi (for nail bars), foot traffic is already back to levels recorded this time last year.
There’s no question that Americans miss their stylists:
It is scary. I don’t want to go back to work until it is completely safe. But at the same time I have now been out of work for almost three months.”Noreen Suchodolski | Hair stylist
Just look at the national turn toward DIY home beauty since the start of the pandemic and the widespread closure of salons.
But it is still a psychological puzzle: Why are we willing to risk illness and death for something seemingly superficial?
In most states, hair salons and beauty parlours reopened earlier than other businesses that were deemed non-essential. But tattoo parlours and tanning salons, which also fall in the same “personal care services” category, have not seen similar levels of returning foot traffic. (Pet grooming services, on the other hand, have seen high levels of foot traffic, in part because in some states the service was deemed an essential business.)
Safety Measures
Many hair and beauty salons have elected to stay shut, even in reopened places. Workers say they are nervous about balancing their own health and safety with earning a living, especially because many work on a freelance or contract basis. And, most state regulations call for
salon workers to use personal protective equipment (PPE), which some stylists argue should be reserved for medical workers while there are still ongoing national shortages.
“It is scary. I don’t want to get sick,” said Noreen Suchodolski, 30, a hair stylist from Philadelphia who was laid off in March. Every week she takes part in a Zoom call with almost 40 other freelance stylists who used to work at the Norman Dee salon, where they talk about how to make the workplace safe when it reopens.
“I don’t want to go back to work until it is completely safe,” Suchodolski said. “But at the same time I have now been out of work for almost three months.”
Salons have reopened their doors around the world, including across Europe and in Southeast Asia. Denmark lifted restrictions in mid-April and Switzerland followed suit two weeks later, with Germany and then Spain in May. (In Britain, professional beautification will have to wait until July 4 at the earliest). As in the United States, European governments say grooming business can resume services only under strict conditions, with fines of hundreds of euros for those who violate them.
Some hair stylists and beauticians who have been unable to work say they are getting increasingly desperate. Many are self-employed or freelance workers who are on unpaid leave from salons.
For owners, sustaining a business without revenue isn’t the only financial undertaking they face now; before reopening, they must invest in masks, gloves and social distancing measures for themselves and their clients.
In a recent survey of more than 2,500 salons by the Chicago-based hair industry resource Behind the Chair, just 14.5% of owners said they had enough savings to sustain their businesses through three months without revenue. But about one-third said they could survive only one month. Nearly half said they had no emergency fund at all.
How we cope
That hair and beauty treatments require intimate contact turns out to be kind of the point.
Amid the roar of competing dryers and happy chatter between trusted stylists and loyal clients is the comfort of community. Many beauticians and hairdressers guide clients through major life events — births, marriages, divorces and deaths — over many years, all while striving to make people look and feel their best.
According to the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, a major motivation for salon visits is the stronger sense of their bodies and identities people can get through grooming.
“Many people, particularly women, are so accustomed to thinking about how we represent ourselves publicly that it then becomes structured into our own sense of self,” Orbach said. “That can be very jarring to lose, even when we are stuck at home with nobody to see us.”