I’ve never put much effort into my hair. Growing up, visits to the barber were a simple outing. Dominic Minella of Hollywood Hairstyles in Thunder Bay would plop me in the big chair and, in his smooth Italian accent, ask how I wanted my hair cut. It was always the same. Short in the back, longer in the front so I could comb it to the side. Think Christoper Reeve in Superman or any boy from the 1980s. As an adult, I’ve stuck with a shaggy, swept-back cut that was always easy enough to get until I moved myself (and my hair) to the Yukon in 2018. Follicularly speaking, this is no man’s land for men.
There are more than 20 places to have your hair cut in Whitehorse. Of these, roughly seven are barber shops that specialize in men’s cuts. Still, I have yet to find one I’ll return to with any frequency. And my experience isn’t uncommon. Other men I know have also struggled to find what they’re looking for here even when it’s just a straightforward trim.
On one of my earliest attempts, I ventured into a shop downtown and asked to have three to four inches taken off. The lovely Eastern European woman who did it was very efficient, able to cut while simultaneously offering commentary on my receding hairline, a feature I hadn’t noticed until she pointed it out. She also insisted on trimming my bristly eyebrows, lest they “catch the wind and carry me away on a stiff breeze.” For her finale, she called me “a little bear” while buzzing the hair at my neckline.
It wasn’t the honest analysis that kept me from returning. She just cut my hair too short. I figured one of the other six options could do the job as requested and chose one with a classic spinning barber pole and gold-on-black sign reading Yukon Man.
“Just take off a few inches,” I said once I was caped and seated in the barber’s chair. “I’d like to keep it a bit shaggy.”
“We don’t do women’s haircuts,” the barber told me. “We only do fades.”
I didn’t want a fade, the short, gradient haircut popularized by David Beckham, Will Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo, and I told the barber as much. He shrugged his shoulders as if to say “take it or leave it.” I left it, with my long, womanly hair.
Finally, I came up with what I thought was a failsafe system. I found a picture of Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Classic and uncomplicated. A bit long with a side part. Once in the chair at yet another venue, I showed the photo to the barber. He looked at it. He looked at me. He gestured to a poster on the wall with 12 photographs of men sporting short hair, each one marked with a number. “Which one?” he asked. I showed him Mr. Redford again.
“OK,” said the barber. “Number nine. Lionel Messi.”
The Lionel Messi is a fine haircut. An informal poll suggests it’s one of the more popular options in town (a friend of mine also ended up with it after visiting the same barber), but it’s no Robert Redford. I don’t know if the Dominic Minellas of the world are a dying breed or if it’s a Whitehorse problem that barbers can’t fathom a men’s cut unless it’s short and has appeared on the head of a footballer. Being that I’m a patriotic Canadian, when I visit my fourth shop, I’ll look for one that at least has photos of hockey players on the walls. If I can’t get the Redford, a Guy Lafleur or a Mike Ricci might be more my style.
