The Mysterious World of Men’s Barbershops

No matter what the identity or status of a customer, he can enjoy a full range of barbershop services. These generally include shoeshines, towels, tea service, hair styling, manicures, pedicures, ear cleaning, shaves, and facial skin care. There are services from head to toe, and just imagining them gives one a sense of dignified ­pleasure.

Returning to a golden age

Stepping into the Taipei Red Rose Hair Salon on Taipei’s Changsha Street is like getting into a time machine. There are two rows of old-fashioned barber’s chairs with electrical sockets and ashtrays, and in front of the chairs are small picture-tube televisions. Although they are broadcasting current events, the warm colors and fuzziness of the images give them a nostalgic air.

On the afternoon of our visit, there are customers of all ages in the salon: elderly, middle-aged, and young. Regular customers familiar with the shop greet the hair stylists and are led to a chair and given a hot towel. After a little small talk, the customers calmly settle down to let the barbers to do their work.

Huang Xiuhua, the only woman stylist at Red Rose, says with a laugh that she is only there to complement the male stylists. She has single-handedly been responsible for manicures and pedicures as well as perms for 20 years, and when she picks up a nail file it is as if she is playing the violin in a symphony orchestra. We watch as the Red Rose barbers, attired in their white uniforms, concentrate on carefully cutting hair. The odor of hair perm lotion floats through the air, mixed with the sounds of scissors snipping locks and the rumble of old-style hair dryers; there is an ambience of restful tranquility.

Taipei’s Red Rose Hair Salon was a symbol of fashion in days gone by. Though it has relocated several times, customers have remained loyal.

Huang Xiuhua uses curlers to give a customer a cold perm, after which a barber will take over to trim his locks into the style that suits him.

Huang Xiuhua is highly skilled at giving manicures and pedicures, solving patrons’ nail problems.

Gotta move with the times

The barbers at Red Rose are on average over 70 years old, and all of them have been working at this trade since a young age. We listen as they describe the three years and four months of their apprenticeships, when they had to handle all the odd jobs, including sweeping floors, washing towels, and cleaning bathrooms—and they had to be sharp-eyed and quick-handed about it. In the past barbers were busy, and had no time to patiently teach their apprentices, so the latter learned by observing the hair stylists while themselves handling the chores, continually accumulating the knowledge they needed for hair styling through this experience.

These barbers have seen it all, and they can easily handle any style desired, including “Yamamoto cuts” (similar to buzzcuts), spiky hair (including quiffs), and undercuts (short on the sides, long on top). The stylists share stories about foreigners who have come to the shop. A YouTube channel called “Bonjour Louis!” and another called “Ku’s Dream,” both created by Frenchmen, have shared videos of hair styling at Red Rose. Not only did the barbers use their professional skills to give them hair styles that set off their best-looking features, the foreigners were surprised and delighted by services such as manicures and shaves, and their videos got quite a large response. Thanks to the Internet, many international visitors and young people have been drawn to patronize the shop.

Huang Bisia (left) founded Huagu Barbershop and from it earned the money with which she raised her children. Her second-eldest daughter, Tseng Yi Jia (right), is carrying on Huang’s hair-styling practices while her third-eldest, Tseng Chin-chwen (center), is promoting barbershop-based tourism. Together they are creating a new future.

The warmth you feel when a hot towel is placed on your face epitomizes the Taiwanese barbershop experience.

Hair salon tourism

Foreigners see traditional barbershops as a way to experience Taiwanese culture. Meanwhile Tseng Chin-­chwen, who headed up a project on Tainan barbershop tourism, is dedicated to spreading the culture and stories of old hair salons. She urges everyone to make hair salons a feature of their travel itineraries, in hopes of reestablishing the links between people and hair salons and enabling them to become part of the routine of even more citizens.

Tseng says that every hair salon is a focal point for the microhistory of the place where it is located. Therefore she adopted the idea of traveling through Tainan by visiting one hair salon in each district of the city in order to curate an exhibition on hair-salon-based tourism in the city. She set up a website where she posted the history of each barbershop, as well as the old place names of the neighborhoods and little-known scenic spots with delicious food and fun activities. She also produced a travel guidebook, and recently has come out with the idea of “exploring Tainan through barbershop tours,” inviting everyone to get to know the city from this new perspective.

Hair salons are places where interpersonal connections are made, and it is common to see customers bring fruit grown by themselves or their families, or dishes of food prepared by them, to give to the barbers. As a child, Tseng, who is the daughter of the owner of a traditional hair salon, did not understand why customers who came to pay for a service also brought gifts. But she observed the same phenomenon in other barbershops and saw how customers and staff not only had a commercial relationship but were like old friends who saw each other from time to time. For example, at Tainan’s Zhao’an Hair Salon we met a customer who had been having his hair cut there for more than a decade. When we asked why every three weeks he made a special trip from the city’s Yongkang District to West Central District just to get his locks trimmed, he gave this clever response: “Of course it’s because it’s what I’ve grown used to. It is like going home for meals—when it’s time to eat you simply have to go home.”

Tseng Chin-chwen believes that if we use hair salons as focal points of travel, the sense of daily life one gets in a traditional barbershop can transform visitors into people who are no longer outsiders to the city, and give them a more profound local experience. Tseng’s second oldest sister, Tseng Yi Jia, is a stylist at Huagu Barbershop. She once had a customer from Belgium, and as they chatted she learned that he enjoyed cooking and wanted to buy a Taiwanese kitchen knife, so she went with him to a traditional market to look for one, and even took him to try some rice soup with mushrooms and an oyster omelet. Such endearing human interactions are sure to become beautiful memories for travelers.

In a traditional barbershop one can simultaneously enjoy a variety of services such as haircuts and manicures, giving one a sense of respect and dignity.

In traditional barbershops the hair stylists are all assigned numbers, and you can see from the number of plates the extent to which these businesses flourished in days gone by. The plates read “at work” (white), “gone out” (blue) and “off work” (green).

The hair salon as museum

Tseng Chin-chwen describes barbershops as museums of daily life, with salons from different time periods preserving the tools of the trade of their eras. For example, different types of hair-washing basin from different eras, including the two-person sink, the drawer-type basin hidden inside a dressing table, and the movable reclining sink, can be found in different hair salons. They testify to how the basins have evolved into the reclining hair-­washing chair and sink widely used today.

Tseng says that Taiwan’s unique history has given rise to a local hair-salon culture that combines Chinese, Japanese, and European elements. Barbers who came to Taiwan with the tide of Han Chinese immigration during the Qing Dynasty brought supplementary services including treatment of sore throats and eye washing. During the era of Japanese rule, Western equipment like barber’s chairs and dressing tables were introduced and it became customary for barbers to wear uniforms, marking the beginning of modernization of Taiwan’s hair salons. Meanwhile, Japanese elements such as the popular Yamamoto cut and curling-iron perms were adopted in imitation of popular trends in Japan.

We follow Tseng Chin-chwen on a visit to Zhao’an Hair Salon, which has particular expertise in ear cleaning. The boss, Huang Dexiang, is a barber who is also a sculptor, metal­worker, and illustrator. He enjoys doing things by hand, and he even makes his ear cleaners himself, using various materials including gold, silver, bronze, and bamboo, to deal with the differently shaped ears of customers.

The nostalgic Huang has collected a lot of barbering memorabilia from the past. For example, the men’s pomade which he jokingly calls one of the top ten torture items of hair salons was a product used over 50 years ago to plaster down locks on the head. Why does he call it torture? Huang explains that it was made by mixing lime, hydrochloric acid, and red lead oxide, and was strongly caustic. When using it one needed to carefully calibrate where to apply it and for how much time. When properly used it could soften the hair and help in styling, but when applied for too long it could make the hair brittle and even injure the scalp. The proper application required skill and know-how.

Meanwhile, curling-iron perms, which were popular for a while in Taiwan, early on were done using metal tongs with bags of calcium carbide powder attached. The ­calcium carbide would be wetted, causing a hot chemical reaction that heated up the tongs, thereby perming the hair. Huang says humorously that when the whole head was covered with these tongs there was a lot of weight on there, making this procedure another a kind of torture. He then pulls out a pair of metal tongs more than 70 years old which look a little like modern curling tongs, but had to be heated over an open flame in a metal container. Huang relates that in the past hair stylists would judge the temperature of the tongs by their smell, and when used to perm hair they had an immediate curling effect. “In the past, people needed only the slightest curl in their hair to consider themselves to be fashionably coiffed and they walked the streets with pride,” says Huang with a laugh.

Father-and-son team Huang Dexiang (left) and Huang Jincheng (right) of the Zhao’an Hair Salon are working together to help traditional hair styling keep up with the times.

Huang Dexiang shows us a pair of old-fashioned curling tongs. Huang, who enjoys making things by hand, has created ear cleaners from various materials as well as barbershop figurines rich with a childlike sense of fun.

Back to the future?

The barbershop-centered Tainan travel exhibition that Tseng Chin-chwen is curating has no fixed end date and will continue until the hair stylists retire. When the owners of these salons get old and there is no successor to take over from them, they go out of business, and the “exhibition spaces” (their salons) cease operations. All one can do then is to read about their pasts on the exhibition website.

Nonetheless, there are some young people who see the potential in men’s hair salons and want to make them into a cool and trendy part of popular culture. Sculptor Barber, located in Far Eastern Department Store’s Xinyi A13 branch in Taipei, is a combination hair salon and art gallery that completely overturns people’s ideas about barbershops.

Just as museums change exhibitions from time to time, salon founder Chou Shih Hsiung, who is himself a contemporary artist, brings into play his expertise in curating shows to try all kinds of different things in his establishment. For example, he has put on joint exhibitions of works of various artists, fashion shows, and DJ parties, playing with the possibilities of the space. On the day of our visit, on display in the gallery space is a work entitled Pilgrim, which Chou created using recycled engine oil. The oil produces a mirror effect, and even as people are admiring the work they are a part of it. Customers cannot resist taking numerous photos.

Besides seeking novelty and innovation, Sculptor Barber also works with Red Rose Hair Salon to get old master barbers to pass along their skills. One older hair stylist gesticulates with chopsticks as he enthusiastically demonstrates shaving techniques. Sculptor Barber invites old barbers to come and be boss for a day, blending veteran experience with new creativity and thereby providing even more inspiration for Taiwan’s hair and beauty culture.

Whether it be traditional barbershops or cutting-edge new salons, Taiwan’s hair and beauty services have always been based on putting the customer first, providing care from head to foot. Professional barbers wish to use their warm, strong hands to serve customers right up until the day they are no longer able to wield scissors.

Sculptor Barber has expanded the possibilities of the hair salon space while providing a meticulous barbershop experience. For something as simple as a shave they have a number of steps including placing a towel on the customer’s face, mixing the shaving cream, and using a soft-bristled brush to wipe away the shaved facial hair.

Expert barbers use their warm, strong hands to pamper men from head to foot.