Barbers protect men’s egos, hairdressers threaten them.

A few months ago, I went to a hairdresser’s and was treated like royalty. Before I’d even sat down, I was offered a drink - coffee, sparkling water, even sparkling wine, and a head massage to go with it. Certificates lined the walls between black-and-white posters of ambition and beauty: lean cheekbones, sharp fringes, the permanent air of forward motion. I declined the pampering and just asked for a short back and sides.

The woman who cut my hair worked with quiet confidence, and when I got home, my family applauded. That’s the best haircut you’ve had in ages! Applause for a haircut is rare, but I drank it in. I felt taller.

So, of course, I went back.

This time, I was met by a different woman. She sat me down, combed through my thinning hair with the expression of someone poking at a plate of cold spaghetti. “With hair like this,” she said, “maybe it’s time to accept that it’s over. Shave it all off. Cheaper, easier. You could do it yourself at home over the basin.”

I left with a cut that was half as good and an ego that had been run through the clippers.

On the way back to the car, I passed a barbershop. They have always struck me as places trapped in time: striped poles, leather straps, cut-throat razors sharpened against them. The faint smell of talc, the slap of cologne on freshly shaved cheeks. Barbers move like tired circus weightlifters, skilled, stoic, resigned to life’s harshness. They don’t offer head massages or sparkling water. But if you walk in with a bald patch or a thinning crown, they won’t mock you. They’ll cut what remains with a kind of quiet respect.

That’s the paradox. Hairdressers offer glamour but risk exposure. They can look at your head and see only loss, then announce it with the frankness of a doctor delivering bad news. Barbers, by contrast, role-play masculinity itself. They don’t ask what you want. They just do it. No chit-chat, no judgement. In their hands, even a receding man can feel protected, as if stroked, brusquely but reassuringly, by a stern father.

And this is where archetypes begin to stir beneath the comb and cape.

The hairdresser is the Great Mother in Jungian terms: promising beauty, rejuvenation, transformation. She presides over the rituals of washing, massaging, pampering. In her chair, you submit. Your head is cradled, your scalp touched, your vanity soothed. But she can also turn cruel. The same mother who nurtures can wound. A careless phrase, “time to shave it all off”, and suddenly you’re the child stripped of illusion, told that vitality has abandoned you.

The barber, on the other hand, belongs to the Father archetype. He is the figure of law and boundary. There is no illusion, no pampering. He offers order, structure, clean lines. With his blades and brushes, he pares things down to their essence. In his shop, baldness is not a tragedy but a fact of life. Strength lies in acceptance. The razor is merciless, but it is also merciful: it cuts away fantasy and leaves you with something honest, even noble.

Hair itself has always carried symbolic weight. To cut it is never just cosmetic. In mythology, long hair stands for vitality, youth, and sexual energy. Samson’s power famously resided in his locks, undone by a barber’s betrayal. Buddhist monks shave their heads to renounce vanity. Soldiers shear recruits to strip away individuality and bind them to the unit. To lose one’s hair naturally, then, is to be confronted by mortality. Yet baldness also has its counter-image: monks, sages, generals. The polished dome becomes a crown of another kind, not beauty, but authority.

So the encounter at the hairdresser’s was more than a bad cut. It was an initiation rite, a brush with archetypal truth. The hairdresser, the Mother, withdrew her approval, denied the illusion of youth, and pushed me toward the bald, paternal realm. I wasn’t ready. I wanted her magic, not her honesty.

The barber, meanwhile, waits patiently across the street, stropping his blade. He will not flatter me, nor will he pity me. He will cut what remains, shave what is gone, dust me down with talc, and send me back into the world chastened but intact. In his chair, there is no applause, no glamour, only the quiet dignity of acceptance.

And perhaps that is why men choose as they do. To sit with the hairdresser is to gamble: will you be made new, or will you be unmasked? To sit with the barber is to surrender to something older and sterner. Both are rituals of the head, but one tempts you with illusion, the other strips you down to truth.

Barbers protect men’s egos. Hairdressers threaten them. Both, in their way, are priests of the same altar: hair as the visible crown of the soul, thinning one strand at a time.