Archival Tape -- Unidentified Hairdresser #1:

“When I saw the announcement on Sunday. The truth is, I was like, oh, my goodness. Oh, we're gonna be flooded.

For me, you know, a lot people have been private messaging me on social media saying, oh, I really miss you, I just can't wait. It's a ritual of coming and relaxing and pampering yourself.”

[Theme music starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

After enduring one of the world’s longest lockdowns, Melbourne is slowly reopening.

Hairdressers and barber shops have been some of the first businesses allowed to welcome customers back.

Today - senior reporter for The Saturday Paper, Rick Morton, on the return of hairdressers, and the intimate role they play in our lives.

[Theme music ends]

RUBY:

Rick, what made you want to tell this story?

RICK:

It's a bit of a funny one, because I was watching Daniel Andrews, the Premier of Victoria, do his press conference on Sunday.

Archival Tape -- Daniel Andrews:

“The following settings will be open, subject to, of course, Covid safe conditions. Tennis. Skate parks…”

RICK:

The news escaped me at first, but the hair salons were here announced that they would be open from midnight that night.

Archival Tape -- Daniel Andrews:

“Hairdressers will be back open. Real estate auctions…”

RICK:

Melbourne's one of the most locked down cities in the world. It's been locked down now, like almost totally locked down for 100 days, which is one of the records around the world.

Archival Tape -- Daniel Andrews:

“The hard work, the pain, the amazing efforts that Victorians have put in. And quite frankly, on an international scale, the quite amazing job that we as Victorians have done.”

RICK:

It felt like we're in this really unique moment in time where this giant petri dish of a city was going to come out of itself.

And one of the first lines of people who were going to mediate that kind of social response was hairdressers and barbers. I mean, they were going to be seeing people literally crawling out of their houses to maybe do something just superficially beautiful. Just get them their hair done or maybe do something a little bit deeper and just get some social contact for the first time in a really long time.

And it kind of started as like, a joke that I believe deep down wasn't really a joke. I was being silly, but I wondered, you know, what would the hair of these people tell us about what they went through? And more importantly, what about the conversations they'll be having?

Because I think, you know, if any social scientists around the world would be there wanting to study this moment.

RUBY:

Mmm. Ok. And so, what has it been like as hair salons have reopened?

RICK:

I've heard so many different stories now of hairdressers just running within half an hour of the news to open their salon so they could take bookings. And within hours, some of them were booked out until the very end of the year.

Archival Tape --Unidentified Hairdresser #2:

“Yesterday morning, we started to get so many phone calls, oh my god, I was not expecting that much people looking for the haircut. I was not thinking the people are being that desperate.”

RICK:

There were lines down the street in different suburbs.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Hairdresser #3:

“My email, my phone just started going bananas with clients wanting to make appointments.”

RICK:

All these little old men just lining up very patiently, socially distanced, waiting to get their trim.

Archival Tape --Unidentified Customer #1:

“My hair are growing wildly, I’ve never grown my hair this long, seriously. I was so relieved yesterday.”

RICK:

So it's kind of like this air of jubilation and celebration and excitement.

Archival Tape -- Hairdresser #2:

“So they are being very happy, we could see their face being very happy, very fresh yeah?”

Archival Tape --Hairdresser #3:

“I feel like we’ve got one of the best jobs in Victoria at the moment! [laughs]”

RICK:

We've got people who have been shut in for 100 days who lived alone, particularly elderly people.

And if you take the example of Neil, who's a hairdresser in Fitzroy.

Archival Tape -- Neil:

“...I've been hairdressing 21 years. That's mental. That when I do, someone's head is 21 years old. I'm like, oh my God, you're born in ‘99? That's when I started hairdressing…”

RICK:

He had a number of clients who had fairly emotional responses to the experience of being touched for the first time in a long time.

Archival Tape -- Neil:

“I gotta remember that the first lock down some people, I did their hair. This is the first time that they've been touched in like six weeks.”

RICK:

I remember there was a period in my life in my 20s where the only time I was touched in any kind of semi intimate way was by my hairdresser. And I used to love getting my hair cut for that reason. And at first I was embarrassed to tell people because it sounds like an admission of, I don't know, that there's something wrong with you, but it's you know, we're social creatures, we live and die by social acceptability and whether others around us see us as one of them. And I think having such little moments like that are so powerful for your connection to the tribe.

RUBY:

And Rick, what have people told you about the act of getting their haircut, how does it change the way that they feel about themselves?

RICK:

So You've got people like Jackie, who is a mental health nurse from Melbourne.

And her relationship with her hairdresser, Neel, is really, really important to her.

Archival Tape -- Jackie:

“I had a relationship break up at the very sort of Covid. It was actually the day I came in and got my haircut last.”

Archival Tape -- Neil:

“I remember!”

Archival Tape -- Jackie:

“Anyone else, I would say no, I'm not going to get my hair cut. I've just broken up this morning and I came in here and saw Neil.”

RICK:

He's been with her through new jobs, relationship breakdowns and illness.

Archival Tape --Jackie:

“I remember, I walked out the door and someone rode past on their bike and said, ‘oh great smile’. And then came back and said, ‘I love your hair!’”

RICK:

For most of her life, she straightened her thick curls. But it was actually Neil who specializes in curls who made her feel more confident and comfortable with her natural hair and more connected to her cultural heritage.

Archival Tape -- Jackie:

“I remember the first time I came and saw Neil, it was still pretty straight. And I was so excited with the so-called curls that he got done. And now looking at it a few years later, it's so... it is who I am.”

RICK:

And so we start to flesh out this idea that these haircuts, these very top level things, are actually going straight to the core of our identity in many cases. I don't want to overread it, but in so many different ways, that's the core theme of the responses that we're getting from people.

RUBY:

Which goes, I suppose, the idea that hairdressers, they are more than people who just cut hair.

RICK:

Absolutely. And it seems to me as if the pent-up stress of an entire city might actually be mediated by these salons and barbershops.

And I guess it goes to that idea that, you know, they really are more than the scissors they wield or the dye they put in. And there is an intimacy that forms in this chair that you just don't really get in many other interactions in day to day life.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, has it been a surprise to you discovering how significant the role of hairdressers are to many people’s lives, how much they’ve been missed?

RICK:

It's really clear that it's not just a simple transaction. You know, they play a much bigger role in our lives. And they often act as therapists, you know, counselors, trauma therapists in some cases, in some cases domestic violence or family violence referral services, but very informally.

Another hairdresser, Zowie Evans, has done training and is now an ambassador of a program called The Rs. So she's actually preparing for a potential increase in disclosures around trauma, mental health and family violence.

Archival Tape -- Zowie Evans:

“We are going to be that initial step for those clients to be able to walk through that door and be able to provide that information and the issues with having such a heavy lockdown.”

RICK:

So these workers are at the coalface of people's experiences of lockdown.

Archival Tape -- Zowie Evans:

“Family family violence has grown, you know, so it is being able to tackle that and understanding our responsibility, you know, as a community.”

RICK:

You know, you've got to meet people where you find them. And this just happens to be one of the first meeting places. In fact, in some cases, the very first meeting place that people have after locked down.

RUBY:

And this obviously a really difficult thing to quantify, but do we have a sense of how many people rely on these relationships in this way?

RICK:

So I’ve been speaking to University of Melbourne researcher, Hannah McCann, and she actually specializes in looking at the relationship between hairdressers and their clients.

Archival Tape --Hannah McCann:

“People definitely said that not being able to visit their salon in the regular way made them feel disconnected. Overwhelmingly, people said disconnected.”

RICK:

She's actually been working on this huge research project. And so far she's surveyed 400 people, including salon workers, about their jobs and started really diving into the deeper emotional aspects of their work.

Archival Tape -- Hannah McCann

“One in eight people said that they had disclosed something traumatic to their hairdresser before, or their salon worker. And other things that people said that they disclosed were around mental illness. Marriage breakdown. Relationship breakdown. Gender transition. Suicidal ideation. Family violence. Terminal illness was actually one or really serious chronic illness concerns.”

RICK:

She found this really interesting difference between the way hairdressers were thought about in the first and second lockdowns. And there are so many responses in this survey that she's done about people who are saying, I never really thought about why it was important that I had my fake lashes on, for example, because people are so dismissive of it.

And, you know, including, you know, more widely progressives and feminists and things like that, saying, well, why do we care what society wants us to look like? And it's true that a very small proportion of her survey respondents actually said that they felt relief during lockdown because they didn't have to live up to this ideal anymore.

But a much larger proportion were actually really concerned about the fact that this one thing about themselves that they knew what to do with, they knew how to control it. That was lost as well.

Archival Tape -- Hannah McCann:

“I had one survey respondent and he said, “I associate long hair with sadness”. And, that's really profound, that idea that not being able to have control over that being associated with really negative emotions is really interesting and deserves a lot more time than just dismissing it as some norm.”

RICK:

In the kind of psychological wash pool that is this entire year, you want to hang onto as many of those rituals as you can.

Archival Tape -- Hannah McCann:

“So when you get a crisis like Covid-19, everyone's got mental health issues skyrocketing. And then you've got this service where those are the people that are going to hear those things. You need to bridge that gap between all the mental health services that have been announced, the extra funding and the people who are hearing the disclosures.”

RICK:

So I think, you know, Hannah's research touches on something that's really quite important and really draws out of that the threads of a deep, complex interaction between all these different factors.

Archival Tape -- Hannah McCann:

“People are feeling like this has been a hideous time. They want to feel different. They want to feel transformed. They want to get on with things by being reborn, right? So it's literally everyone being like, I want to be renewed this week. And that's like something you can really hold on to as hopeful.”

RUBY:

And so, Rick, do you think that after this kind of extraordinary period where so much has changed about the way in which we live, that people have developed a greater appreciation for the things that we took for granted before, things like getting a professional haircut? Is there something that you think we can take away from all of this?

RICK:

Look, I hope so. We are social animals. We need to hug and feel loved and touch and gossip and chat.

You know, hairdressers and their clients are different people in so many different ways, but they're there in this kind of communal safe space. And they chat and they get along and they do their thing. And it's beautiful.

Archival Tape -- Zowie Evans:

“So there's almost that reset or rebirth, as it were, of like, well, it's been a long time. Let's do something different.”

RICK:

One guy booked his first barbershop appointment yesterday and got his hairdresser a bottle of Moet Chandon-

RUBY:

Oh, wow!

RICK:

--because he was just so overjoyed that they're back.

And I just, you know, I really hope that we can hold on to even just a sliver of that, because that's a nice feeling. I like that feeling.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for talking to me about all of this today.

RICK:

Thank you, Ruby. It’s good to see you.

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[Theme music starts]

RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Places of worship in NSW will be allowed to host up to 300 people, and gyms will be allowed to operate without COVID marshalls under the latest easing of restrictions announced by the state government.

The new rules will operate from Friday.

And Victoria has recorded three new cases of coronavirus with Premier Daniel Andrews announcing a case reported on Tuesday is being regarded as a rare "reinfection".

The Premier also confirmed he had been asked by the hotel quarantine inquiry to provide further evidence.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

[Theme music ends]