A decade ago, I read an article by Mr. Money Mustache about cutting his own hair with electric clippers. At the time, I was growing my hair long, so I wasn’t getting haircuts. But it got me thinking.
A few years later, when I got tired of dealing with long hair, I purchased Oster clippers for $50 and cut my own hair for the time. I did a version of a crew cut, with slightly longer hair on top and shorter hair on the sides. It was easy and actually looked pretty good. Even better, it was fast, convenient and free!
I have not paid for a haircut since.
I alternated between growing my hair long for a 18 months then and buzzing it down again several more times until 2017. Then, in 2018 when my wife was getting chemo and expecting to lose her hair, I shaved it down to my scalp. There was no way I was going to let her go bald alone. Since then, I’ve shaved my head bald ever since except for a brief experiment to grow it out when I was dating last year.
I should have been buzzing my own hair my entire life.
Don’t get me wrong – when I was a little kid, I liked going to the barber every Saturday morning with my Uncle Bob. It was an event. After breakfast, we’d drive downtown to Joe the Barber. Joe was an old man, like my uncle. His barbershop was in a storefront on the first floor of a house. I assumed he lived in one the apartments upstairs.
There were containers of blue barbiside holding combs on his counter. His 2 barber chairs looked like they were 100 years old. There were always several customers in the store – friends of my uncle and Joe. While my uncle got a hair cut and shave, I’d thumb through the magazines while watching Joe strop a straight razor, lather up my uncle with warm shaving cream, and shave him with what looked like a lethal weapon.
When he cut my hair he used scissors then finished the edges with clippers. He’d shave my neck with that same deadly straight razor and loads of warm shaving cream. Then he’d finish up by brushing off the loose hair and hitting me with a blast from his air sprayer.
After our haircuts, Uncle Bob and I would run errands. We’d visit the Butcher, the Baker and Tom Friday’s deli. They had home storefronts just like the barber. While waiting for our orders, we’d shoot the bull with other customers and the shopkeepers. Uncle Bob knew everyone and they all knew me too.
Around noon we’d head back home for lunch, where we’d feast on sandwiches made with freshly bought sandwich spread, ham or roast beef, cheddar cheese from the deli and fresh Italian bread from the the baker.
I can almost taste, smell and feel it all today…50 years later.
My Uncle Bob died when I was 6. Soon after, we moved away from my small hometown to Pittsburgh. Getting a haircut became just another unpleasant task. My mother would select the cheapest mass market salon (think Supercuts), give me a coupon and send me on my way. Mostly I remember disinterested women rushing through my haircut while talking nonstop to the other hair dressers.
When I entered high school, I became extremely devoted to looking good. I had grown from a fat kid into a slender teen. I was girl crazy and, as such, paid a lot of attention to my hair (which was fantastic), my muscles (which were puny) and being cool (which I wasn’t).
Over the next 15 years, I had my hair cut by “specialists”. I’d get razor cuts or scissor cuts. My hair was lustrous, longish, and feathered. It looked great. Each haircut cost me $40-50. In high school, that was as much as I made in a week! Even after college, that was more than a day’s pay.
Crazy.
Eventually, as I got older and cared less about my hair, I went back to barbers. Whenever I moved to a new place, I’d find the local barber shop and would become a regular. A few shops reminded me a little of Joe’s but it was never the same for me. Most of the people there were transients, like me. None of us grew up in those communities. The barber shops might have looked and smelled a lot like Joe’s, but it wasn’t the same.
Now that I have an ever growing bald spot on the back of my head, I use a “bald” clipper to shave my head down to the shortest stubble possible. I could grow my hair out, but I would have a thin spot up top and since it is all gray and wiry now, I’d rather keep it shaved.
It is awesome.
I never need shampoo. I can dry my head with a few quick swipes of a towel. I wear hats all the time and never have hat head. It is never messy. It takes me about 3 minutes to shave my head and I do it every other day.
I guess a downside is that, as a bald dude, I look old. But, you know what? I am old!
In retrospect, I wish I would have stated buzzing my hair when I was 6. I would have avoided decades of hair maintenance, hundreds of hours of annoying hair cuts, and thousands of dollars.