Adventures in Haircuts

I finally got a haircut today after several months of shagginess. I am not really big on haircuts as you might surmise, maybe its a male thing or just a laziness thing or just simply, a thing. In any case, I have been through my share of “coiffeurs” during my 16 years here in Paris. My old favorite was Space Hair down on rue Rambuteau in the 4th. I lived a few blocks away from it, but ceased going when I moved out of the neighborhood. It is a very interesting salon in the center of Gay Paris. There is always some recent house/pop blasting. Loads of slim, sulky, leather-clad young bald-scalped men slinking around with slicked down hair and scissors. It was almost like time-travel back to the 80’s. The haircuts were good and the scalp massages were top class.

I went through a few more salons before finding Les Chevelus (roughly translated, “the hairy ones”). Unfortunately, they went bust about 6 to 9 months ago. That is unfortunate because they also gave haircuts. As far as I recall, there was this sort of squatty black-haired girl with thick black glasses that seemed to be the owner. She had a partner (not sure if the partnership was beyond the shop or not) that was blonde and always wearing fuck-me boots. There were two unshaven young guys there as well, a blonde and a brunette. I could never recall the names of any of them, so I never actually requested a specific stylist so I must have gone through all four at one point or another. In any case, it was my local for haircuts for almost 6 years before going belly-up. You can see an octopus in the photo to the left? There were two charming things about the place: a CD jukebox with decent rock and funky hits all the time and the wacky hand-painted octopus-alien-hair stylists that crawled all over the walls and occupied my imagination during every cut I had there. A real shame that they disappeared.

I am not looking for some other place and haven’t settled on one – probably another explanation for the long gap between getting my hair cut. Just about across the street from me is J.S. (or Josy as the window says) Coiffure. It is just OK. The lady is nice enough (and pretty cheap at €20) but the cut itself is nothing special. I also tried a barber – the only female barber in the city – as in the shaving knife like in the movies and a real treat for those of us with beards or goatees. Only problem is that it is further away and has odd hours – most of which are inaccessible to me. So, in the meantime, I am open to suggestions…There is also an – not kidding – organic hair stylist across from my massage place Uma on rue Charon but they are also difficult to get appointments with…