Hair of All Types

A few years before I ever decided to cut hair as a job, I cut hair in my kitchen. 

And my neighbor's kitchen, and my manager's kitchen. Who knows really, in how many kitchens I snipped curls and coils and ringlets and rinsed hair next to a used coffee cup from this morning. 

The thing that these women all shared was that they had curly hair, brittle hair, damaged hair. Hair that would break, hair that they fought with, hair that wouldn’t grow. Hair that they openly did not feel was beautiful. 

I understood. I knew what it was to feel that way. 

My neighbor had deep sandy ringlets that I still remember for their remarkable elasticity. They sprung when touched and maddeningly gathered together in one large and perfect stubborn clump. She would deftly pull them apart while chatting with me over her back fence. It was clear as she worked that it was a motion that she had done for most of her life, over and over again. And as quickly as she separated them, it clumped back together. 

Her hands kept working while I thanked her for the way her husband would come by my car and pull up my window wipers when it started to snow. She laughed, thanking me for giving him something to do, her fingers dancing once again in pursuit of the perfect halo. 

My manager had delicate blonde hair that curled in every direction away from her head. I knew this because I used to watch it bounce and shake, backlit by the Dionysian glass paneling behind the bar. We worked at a restaurant owned by Greeks and as we separated pitted and non pitted olives and crumbled blocks of feta soaking in brine we talked about her hair. She had always hated it. 

I snipped it, curl by curl at the bar during a slow lunch shift, using a pair of scissors from the kitchen. I wet it with water from a plastic glass and twirled damp ringlets around my fingers before opening duties for the dinner shift began. 

I was a waitress in the pandemic and early post pandemic years, and no one was doing their hair. 

Flatirons had been put away, roots with inches of white showed, and once fiercely bright blondes had become natural and deep to right past their cheekbones. Hair grows half an inch a month, and as the days of the pandemic turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months` I watched an evolution of the women around me take place. I watched their hair shift and morph into something less tame. 

But to my eye, it was all the more beautiful. 

I will never forget the elegant woman who drove up in her Range Rover to curbside pickup, without fail, every week. As time passed I delivered each sandwich and watched as the brunette bun gave way to a perfect shining white, bit by bit. Her exclusively white bob marked the end of the pandemic in my mind. I remember her pulling up, every last centimeter of brown snipped away. A crisp white bob swung beneath her chin.

It was the first time I had seen her without a mask on, and I realized just how much her white hair complimented her beautiful tanned skin. 

The women who reverted to their pre-pandemic selves, who picked up the flat irons and went back to the blonde, it seemed right for them. I watched them pour in for lunch, refreshed, relieved. The women who didn’t, who went for something a little wilder and a little freer- that seemed right for them too. Hair should be whatever you want it to be, I realized. It is a reflection of who you are. Hair exists in many forms and shapes, and all kinds of types. 

 And though I did not know it then, I was realizing the kind of hairdresser I would be. 

I grew up in Alaska, raised by hippies. I played with shapes and mud and watercolors and textiles. I mixed “potions” with dried herbs and put them in my face and on my hair and the hair of my unsuspecting sisters. I ran wild in the beauty section of the health food store and emerged covered in organic eye shadow samples and face creams. 

I went to college in the state of Washington and came to Maine as a brief pit stop on the way towards what it was that I would eventually want to do, something that wouldn't feel like wrangling my brain. I felt undecided, bouncing around with languages and liberal arts experience. Carrying the empathy of the oldest of four daughters. Maybe social work? Maybe history? 

But during the pandemic when I snipped hair it felt like breathing. When I stood in my neighbors kitchen and watched her hair change under my hands while we chatted about her tomatoes- it felt like joy. 

So I became a hairdresser. And in retrospect it was silly I ever tried to be anything else. 

When we started this business and were asked to write mission statements and fill out forms, I struggled with how to describe what we do. Should we be a curly salon? A scalp focused salon? One for damaged hair? One known for blondes? What about grey blending? We use non toxic products- should that be the category?

None of it quite felt right. 

Because at Newfound, we believe that hair is not something to be standardized. The way in which people choose to wear their hair has roots that are broad, deep, and unique to them. And we believe that is something to be respected, and understood. 

Heat treated, air dried, straightened, curly, coily, wavy, straight, healing, shifting, damaged, grey- at Newfound Hair Co., we welcome hair of all types.

Wavey Adrian 

Co- Owner and Hairdresser 

Newfound Hair Co. 

Portland, Maine