There is a gap in the market. It’s hard to believe it exists. In an industry that should provide adequate service for all its clients, somewhere something broke. What am I referring to?. The unbelievable reality that most hairdressers can’t cut men’s hair. When I say men’s hair let me be specific. I mean men that want a proper haircut, cut with the same parameters as you would expect from a women’s haircut. I don’t mean men that want a cut from a barber because that is something else. So why is it so difficult to find?

Well like most trades and most apprenticeships it begins with the training. What many of you don’t know is that when you begin hairdressing whether it’s in the best salons in the world or at the various colleges around the country or perhaps in the small independent salons to which there are thousands, men’s haircuts are the last to be communicated. It’s so imbalanced that in the three years of training, men’s haircuts are allocated three months at the very end. Yep that’s right you heard it, three months. The idea is that you use what you have learned on women’s hair and apply the same techniques to men. But this is all wrong. Men’s haircuts are far from the ubiquitous short back and sides. Men have different head shapes, different face shapes, different textured hair they couldn’t be more different to women so why on earth aren’t they an equal part of the training?.

The impacts of such curtailed education are massive. Men become the pariahs of salons. Shoved into quick appointments, ushered out as quickly as possible, they are treated like they aren’t worthy of a decent haircut. They are so forgotten within the industry they aren’t even allowed a balanced comfortable environment to have their haircut. Either they choose a salon environment that is overly feminised or they are pushed into the barbershop which are generally overly masculinised where women are unashamedly excluded. If you’re a man that doesn’t want either of these environments where are you supposed to go? I can accept that this frame work may well have worked in the nineteen fifties but in 2023? In this day and age where the world seems obsessed with the gender debate how has the hairdressing industry remained so indefinitely stuck in the past?

Early on in my career I realised that women’s hair was as much about blow drying and styling as it was the haircut. I was never that interested in blow drying hair. I understand what a real skill it is and I had no choice but to learn, but to me it was always an afterthought, the sauce to accompany all the other amazing ingredients on the dish. As my career progressed and I watched the hundreds of different stylists in all the different salons I’ve worked in it was clear to me that blow drying was an easy cheat to make a bad haircut look amazing. With men’s hair there are no cheats .There is nowhere to hide. Either you cut it right or it’s going to look awful and no amount of styling is going to get you out of it.

When I trained at Trevor Sorbie I was so frustrated with the training I started working on my day off in a bid to practise without the rigidity of the training staff watching over me. I wanted to practice, I wanted to begin the process, developing technique and understand it in my own way. The result of my passion and drive has allowed me to become a master craftsman. Curly, coarse, fine, thick, wavy, super-straight, long, short, difficult, easy, I can do it all.

Thank you to those of you that have spent the time looking for me, who have kindly used your time to read what I’ve written here.