With women in charge, hair salons would be the first to open
Citizens rejoice! the notion of Britain once again being a nation of shopkeepers is within our grasp. non-essential retail such as mobile phone shops and fashion stores will soon fling open their doors to a grateful public who, it is hoped, will come flocking in their socially distanced droves to worship at the temples of consumerism.
When it comes to pass, it will be a long-awaited and timely moment, and one that signals the beginning of the end of lockdown in a very tangible sense. But while the reopening – first in england – spells hope for thousands of businesses which have been fighting for survival over the past few months, i fear there may be a slight fly in the ointment. in a word: hairdressers.
it has often been theorised throughout this crisis that had the Westminster Government put more women at the heart of decisionmaking, matters might have gone more smoothly.
i can now see clearly that this is the case. For who but a group of middle-aged men with excess nasal hair and bushy eyebrows would make such a daft error as to open up fashion before hair and beauty?
Really, it’s quite simple. Men buy clothes when they need them: new socks to replace those with holes in; new trousers when they lose (or gain) weight; a new jumper if the old one’s moth-eaten.
they tend to stick to the familiar and shop quickly and efficiently, with targeted precision. it is simply another task, like replacing a light bulb or going to the dump.
Women are different. We rarely shop for necessity if we can help it; we shop for pleasure. For us it is a form of escapist leisure activity, a way to slip out of our ordinary lives into a fantasy world where we might just be Kate Moss or eva longoria, if only we had the right dress.
For the same reason we read glossy magazines and subscribe to instagram feeds featuring impossibly beautiful ‘influencers’ doing impossibly glamorous things. this transports us away from the kids and the bills and the fact that even though he says he’ll load the dishwasher, he never does it properly and you always have to do it again anyway.
and the thing about this nonessential shopping women do — which sustains so much of the fashion industry and retail in general — is that it is very dependent on mood and self-esteem.
if we leave the house feeling a million dollars, we’ll spend. Confidence breeds confidence: the more you like what you see in the mirror, the more you buy.
By contrast, if your roots are showing and your face looks like putty, everything looks bloody awful and it’s all pointless. so you dump the lot and head for the nearest cake shop instead.
it’s basic psychology. and it’s why hairdressers, beauty clinics and the other wellness services that power our self-esteem are so important to the overall retail landscape.
and never more so than now. every woman i know is desperate to get her roots done or her split ends sorted. Others want a pamper, a decent pedicure, some waxing or a facial to blast away the cobwebs.
i long to get my eyebrows threaded and can’t face leaving the house in any meaningful way until they have been. Because, frankly, why get all dressed up in new clothes if you still look like you’ve lived in a hedge for three months?
in this crisis we have discovered entire sectors of previously undervalued workers who, it turns out, are worth their weight in gold. Hairdressers belong in that category, too, and there is no earthly reason, that i can tell, why they can’t reopen along with everything else.
surely with appropriate PPe, a strict appointment system and lots of common sense, they can get back to work. and we can get back to saving the economy, one pointless purchase at a time.