Do We Have Hair In Our Face?

The rising cost of taming our manes.

- Maggie Bullock

The hairstylist John Barrett once got word that a Saudi princess had requested a blowout on his day off. Would he come in? Yes. But at the agreed upon time, the princess was a no-show. An hour later she phoned. Would he come to the Plaza? “Sure,” Barrett barked sarcastically to his receptionist. “For $10,000.”

No problem. An hour later Barrett fluffed the royal tresses while the princess did a little shopping. Racks of couture and trays of jewelry wafted before her, and she chose as she went: that, that, and that. She’ll take it all.

Barrett tells me this story as he rhythmically slices offthe ends of my locks, shears flashing in the sunlight of his new, art-filled salon overlooking 57th Street. He is one of his industry’s great charmers, and it is not until midway through this process that it occurs to me that he commenced cutting with nary a comment on the decidedly nonroyal wildebeest mop—several months past any reasonable interval of upkeep— with which I arrived. Come to think of it, he commenced cutting without much talk about my hair at all. The usual precut specifics—silhouette, “vibe”—simply never came up.

This is the first signal that one has entered a realm of profoundly expensive hair. Barrett’s core clientele have their ends “dusted” every three weeks, at $650 a clip. Hair like theirs is nurtured and pruned as diligently as the greens at Augusta National.