SALONS CUT TO THE QUICK WITH HOME DYE JOBS, TRIMS ON RISE
Barbers, stylists facing debt, new safety rules when lockdown ends
Steven Alvarez had been meaning for weeks to get a haircut before social-distancing orders suddenly shuttered his favorite barbershop on March 18.
Then within days, the 19year-old Chula Vista resident was laid off from both of his part-time jobs and his classes at Southwestern College moved online. Figuring that none of his friends, co-workers or classmates would see him for a while due to the COVID-19 quarantine, he asked his dad, Steve Alvarez, to use the family’s old home clippers to give him a backyard buzz cut.
On March 23, Steven’s mom, Bianca, streamed the hilarious 20-minute hair-cutting session on Facebook Live, as Steve gradually cut and shaved his son’s hair first into a bowl cut and then into a monk cut with a bald ring on top. Then he cut the back section into triangles and finally shaved out a strip of hair
above the forehead before finishing off with the full buzz.
“We were all laughing ’til our stomachs hurt,” said Bianca, who works in the office at a local grade school. “He was such a good sport about the whole thing. He said it brought back nice memories of when his dad cut his hair when he was little.”
Next on the Alvarez family’s agenda is a plan for daughter Sashia Alvarez, 23, to surprise her mom with some brightly colored hair dye so Bianca can cover her roots until her salon reopens.
The Alvarezes are like millions of others in the U.S. who’ve been forced to resort to what social media users have tagged #badpandemichaircuts in recent weeks. Celebrities including Blake Shelton, Armie Hammer, Pink and Karlie Kloss have also been sharing their shocking quarantine ’dos and dye jobs online. A recent study by Nielsen Data found that in the week ending April 4, sales of hair clippers increased by 166 percent and hair-coloring product sales rose 23 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
But as funny as the #badpandemichaircuts are on social media, it’s no laughing matter for the barbers and salon owners who have lost most, if not all, of their income over the past five weeks with no reopening date in sight.
Shelltown resident Kahlil Bryant has been cutting hair for 27 of his 41 years and has owned the K-cutz Barbershop in Rolando since 2012. He’s also an administrator for the Facebook group Black Barbers of San Diego. Like many of his fellow barbers, Bryant said the fastmoving shutdown order took him by surprise.
On March 16, Bryant said he was following county requirements to limit the number of people in his eight-chair shop to a maximum of 10. The very next morning, orders came down that the shop must close indefinitely by midnight.
“I woke up to them talking about the federal government doing a lockdown,” he said. “I thought: ‘No way, they can’t be serious!’ I was like, ‘man, what am I going to do? I still have bills. There’s rent to pay.’”
Bryant’s landlord refused to suspend his rent payments on the shop, and he was passed over in the first round of COVID-19 small business relief loans. Like many other barbers, he is making a little money cutting hair in homes and garages by appointment for essential workers like businessmen, police officers and military personnel. But even wearing a mask and other safety equipment, he’s only seeing about 25 percent of his usual customers because he said there’s a clear fear of the virus in the community.
Fortunately, Bryant’s wife works for the Girl Scouts organization, so they have a stable income. But looking ahead, Bryant said he worries that the current trend of people cutting and dyeing their own hair will have a long-term impact on his business when it reopens.
“There will be a transition and it will hurt the industry,” he said. “They have the confidence now to do it themselves and maybe they won’t be employed when this is all over. If they were coming twice a month before, maybe now they’ll only come once a month.”
To prepare for that possibility, and what he expects will be a slow return to normal routines by the public, Bryant said he has come up with a new side business. While he was sheltering at home over the past month, his mother-in-law taught him how to sew cloth face masks. Now, sewing has become his new hobby. He’s hoping to supplement his income in the lean months ahead by making and selling his own line of cloth barbering aprons and capes.
“I’m looking past the new year to when people stop getting scared,” he said. “Once there’s a vaccine, I think that will start the trigger of normal society coming back into the shop.”
Over the past 28 years, salon owner Keri Davisduffy said her employees have seen her shed “happy tears” many times. But on March 17, during a Facebook Live meeting with the 90 workers at her three Gila Rut Aveda Salons in San Diego, she broke down and wept uncontrollably.
That day, she and her business partner, Karla Lopez-martinez, laid off all of their employees, some of whom had worked at the upscale salons for 15 to 20 years. She has spent the weeks since calling creditors for extensions, applying unsuccessfully for SBA relief loans, calling former employees to check in and trying to figure out how to reopen after the quarantine.
Davis-duffy — whose salons bear her name in Hebrew, gila means “happiness” and rut means “freedom” or “friendship” — said most people don’t realize that many small businesses won’t survive the shutdown. Spending two to three months with accumulating debt and no income means starting over with a significant deficit.
At the time of the shutdown, Davis-duffy said the business had more than $20,000 in credit card debt for hair care and spa product inventory. Add to that $36,000 a month in combined rent for Gila Rut’s salons in Hillcrest, Otay Ranch and Carmel Valley. Depending on when the salons are allowed to reopen, she and Lopez-martinez could be facing nearly $100,000 in debt by June 1.
Complicating the reopening will be whatever state- and county-mandated safety protocols that salons will be required to enact to protect employees and customers. First she’ll have to remove 50 percent of the salons’ chairs for socialdistancing measures, essentially cutting sales in half. She’ll also need to supply employees with face shields, masks and disposable gloves, as well as disposable smocks and gloves for clients. These extreme safety measures are necessary, she said, since hair-care workers usually touch their clients even more than health care workers touch patients.
On the plus side, Davisduffy said Gila Rut’s customers have been tremendously supportive since the closures. Three weeks ago, she launched a Gila Rut employee relief campaign on Gofundme.com that customers have helped grow to nearly $15,000. To keep clients from ending up with #badpandemichaircuts, she has been posting online home hairc are tutorials. But she has been discouraging them from dyeing their own hair with a campaign she calls #Showusyourroots.
“If someone goes out and does box color, I’m going to have to fix it when they get back,” she said. “But we’re realistic. We’re telling them: ‘We know you’ll do what you need to do and we will accept you unconditionally. You have our blessing to be happy, and whatever you do that needs fixing, we’ll be with you on the f lip side.’”