About a decade and a half ago, when I was fresh out of college, I moved to Cairo to do a fellowship with a nonprofit. Shortly after my arrival, I strolled into a barbershop in the verdant district of Zamalek, in the center of the city. After a buzz on each side and a trim on top, the barber frowned at my complexion and lunged for a skin-whitening serum. Astonished and offended, I deflected the barber, only for him to suggest a round of eyebrow threading.
For a few years this was an anecdote I’d tell people, a lesson in the disaster that might come from messing around with an unknown barber. It hit a nerve. For myself and many of my male friends, barber-loyalty runs deep: We are as faithful as we would be to a therapist. But as time went on, I began to think about that encounter differently. The barber’s suggestion was deeply offensive; but it was also a window into Egyptians’ concept of male beauty. I’d later learn that this aesthetic was called nazif, which loosely translates to “neat” or “presentable.” What if, I wondered, I had at least been curious enough to ask questions?
What I love most about barbershops is their invitation to curiosity in a world where the men they serve are isolated and fragmented. Barbershops are spaces where I’ve encountered tender scenes and surprising intimacies of male life: fathers bringing sons for their first haircuts, men of all ages working through the things of life — children, work, money, school, marriage. Barbershops are a place where I encounter a more complex version of masculinity than the caricature that has captured public attention in recent years.
There are few sites as instructive about a local culture — and what it considers “masculine” — as a barbershop. A little self-deprecation, and a willingness to cross language barriers, is usually enough to join conversations that reveal things about a city’s customs and political moods that you might otherwise miss. The Cairene barber’s suggestion of eyebrow threading, for instance, forced me to notice the meticulous care young men in the city took of their appearance — the perfect fades, shaped beards, curly comb-overs held in place by creams and gels, all of it hinting at an obsession with presentability. A barbershop, I began to see, is a place where we learn to notice elements of culture that might otherwise go unnoticed by an outsider.
I learned this anew last winter in a Warsaw barbershop. In a youthful district east of the city center, Poles and expats alike arrived to get pompadours, slick-backs and executive contours that recalled postwar America — and the barbers were Portuguese. Rockabilly music played in the background, and bottles of Irish whiskey sat on the shelves beside straight razors and tins of British pomade. The menagerie of cultures on offer there suggested an undercurrent — a sign of young Poles’ interest in the world, their openness to non-Polish ideas and their deep desire to be integrated with the rest of Europe. In those clean, perfectly coifed cuts was a departure from the bushy mustaches of the 1980s.
As a social space, barbershops also remind me of my evolving relationship with my own masculinity as I get older. I felt this acutely at a barbershop in Kailua, Hawaii, in 2024, where a group of Hawaiian and Samoan barbers crafted burst fades and mullets for guys in their 20s. As a millennial well into his mid-30s, some of their style cues — baggy jeans and loosefitting tees — reminded me of high school. I struggled to make sense of their choices: What was the beauty of a mullet, a style that no man I knew in early-2000s Hawaii would have been seen in public with? My incomprehension aside, I was glad for this hint on how local masculinity had evolved. These cuts signaled a looseness to local life in this unhurried place, but also, perhaps, an attachment to the flowing hairstyles some Hawaiian men wore centuries earlier. In the closed-off space of that shop, whose windows were tinted, I felt enmeshed in something specific and intimate.
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