SmartReMarxcom

I don’t know how it is with women, but you will never learn more about a guy’s self-image then sending him to Supercuts to get a haircut. Supercuts, and various other like stylist chains, pray on men’s vanity worse than Bowflex commercials. They create an atmosphere where every fellow gets 15 minutes of personal attention and he leaves feeling validated and handsome, wanted and sexy.

It’s never a surprise to scan the Supercuts lobby and take stock of who is there. There is always the ancient gentleman with the enormous bald spot radius and a washed-up college jock who is not yuppie enough to pay for a real haircut with barely an inch of hair on his head to tuft between her fingers. The common denominator is that the vast majority of these male customers don’t really have any substantial need for a haircut.

Yet impossibly, they call ahead and queue up and pay their $15 bucks or so to have some lady snip here and razor there, chat them up and sometimes shampoo them down. At Supercuts, he simply doesn’t need the shampoo service because it’s not enough of a scalp massage to draw wood, and it also doesn’t prevent hair from getting in his collar, falling down his shirt and sticking to his face.

Supercuts is a machine. The gents check-in at the counter, wait their turn on the conveyor belt and then sit down and get whipped into cut shape as fast as the physical development of those ripped hunks on exercise equipment infomercials who started as average joes. But as automated as the process is (and never is it more apparent just how skilled the stylists are then when it’s busy and they cut through a crowd of guys in 30 minutes) every man gets his individual attention.

Stylists make their money on tips. They tend to come in two styles, the girls that will talk him up and the girls that will talk themselves up. You would think the former would have more success because they are showing interest in him but in my experience, it doesn’t really matter whether they talk directly to him, at him, or to each other. It’s the wink and the promise that makes it feel like it’s all about him. And without fail, that is what he gets. A twist of his hair through her fingers and a little well how do you do?

Is that why guys who already have buzz cuts and are getting a buzz cut step into the ‘Cuts? The old man with only some gray hair around his temple is willing to lay down with a stylist? You wouldn’t buy more bananas if you were still working on the last bunch, and it’s the same with a haircut, but men do anyway.

The haircuts are generic, and he never fails to leave covered in his hair and the hair of every guy that she cut before him. The experience is lightning fast, foreplay is “how do you like it?” and the afterglow is a quick once through with some gel and on his way. But it works because it taps into a guy’s self-worth and reminds him that someone still finds him appealing. And when he walks away from the encounter, that feeling stays in heart. And every time he looks in the mirror for, well, at least a day or so, the reminder is right there on his head to boot.

Click on the stars above to rate this article