People assume hair is something you do when you could not do something else, and I have spent twenty-seven years gently correcting this assumption with every haircut, every color, every consultation where I look at a person’s face and understand something about what they need before they have the words for it.
Hair is not what it appears to be.
Hair is trust.
When someone sits in your chair, they give you something.
They give you their reflection.
They give you the back of their head, which is the part of themselves they cannot see, the part they must trust entirely to someone else.
They give you their time and their proximity and the strange intimacy of hands in their hair.
And they give you their words.
Because there is something about the chair, about the angle of it, about looking at yourself in the mirror while someone works around you, that loosens people.
