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Some Chicago hair salons are cutting gender out of their pricing

For years, a trip to the hair salon for Heidi Truax would inevitably come with awkward exchanges. Stylists wouldn’t always know what to charge her, a woman getting a short and traditionally “masculine” cut. So frustrated were she and her spouse, a transgender male, that they cut their own hair at home for several years.

“We both had short hair, and it just got really annoying to sit in somebody’s chair and have them be like, ‘So do you have any kids?’ ” said Truax, a 33-year-old Belmont Cragin resident. “Like I don’t need the heteronormative small talk, and then I don’t need to walk out paying $60 when you cut off an inch of my 3-inch hair. So we just did it at home for a long time.”

When Truax and her spouse were gearing up to get married, they decided to give professional salons another try. But given their experiences, they were looking for a place where they wouldn’t feel judged for their sexuality. After taking recommendations from their queer-identified friends, they ended up at Logan Parlor.

Owners Jamie DiGrazia and Tricia Serpe, who opened the salon in Logan Square in 2014, strived to create a space that exudes vibes of relaxation, comfort and acceptance.

“Just the way that we operate in this space, and I think the way that the space is set up, and the way we’ve decorated it and everything, I think really makes people feel comfortable,” said Serpe, 36.

“We want people to come in, sit at the bar, grab a coffee, read the paper, eat cookies, and then by the time that they get to the chair, they’re relaxed and can actually have an open conversation and ask questions,” DiGrazia added.

DiGrazia, 34, said she’s inspired by her clientele and believes a consultation before the haircut is key.

“We both came in together, and Jamie D. sat us down and was like, ‘Tell me about your hair,’ ” Truax said. “And I know that sounds weird, but it was the first time anybody had asked me about my hair when I walked into a hairdresser. Usually they say, ‘What do you want?’ and then they try and talk to you about B.S. Whereas Jamie was like, ‘Tell me about your hair. Which way does it go? What does it do? What does it not do? When is it dry?’

“And it was the first time that I was ever able to be like, ‘I want the queerest haircut you can possibly imagine; that’s what I’m going for right now.’ “

Women typically are charged more for hair services than men; the industry has propped up that expectation over time. Most of the time, clients don’t even think to question the salon’s prices.

Such a price structure can put LGBTQ people in an uncomfortable position. They are often charged more or less for a service because of their gender assigned at birth, rather than the amount of time it took the stylist to complete that service. So gender nonconforming people face more struggles than most in a salon setting, where typical small talk might be awkward and a stylist might have to ask invasive questions to determine the price of a cut.

Mia Smith, a 42-year-old transgender female, faced many of the same struggles during her transition. Although she’s had many wonderful experiences with stylists, she recounted a number of bad ones, including being publicly outed in a busy North Carolina salon when she was 18. But now, having been a stylist herself for 23 years, she saw a void in the industry and wanted to fill it. She did that by starting Safe In My Chair.

“I wanted to create a resource for transgender clients to be able to find salons and stylists that were not only safe but who were warm, welcoming, inviting and open to embracing their transition,” Smith said. “The salon means so much more to me than it does to anybody else. While I’m a stylist as well and being transgender, the salon for so many years as Mark was really—and in the chair, not behind it, but in the chair was the only place that Mia existed, other than in my head.”

Safe In My Chair’s purpose is to educate salon stylists and beauty professionals as well as to provide a free resource for the transgender community. Smith said she gives stylists the knowledge and tools necessary to accommodate the needs of transgender and other LGBTQ clients, transforming salons into welcoming environments.

“Myself and my team, we have vetted these people, we’ve vetted these salons, we’ve vetted the stylists, and if they see the little icon next to their name, then they can tell that that stylist has not only been vetted but they have been certified and passed my training course,” Smith said. “They have spent four hours with me in a very hands-on training course to know what it’s like to have to deal with transgender people, to know what it’s like to have to deal with a dysphoric meltdown, to prepare your salon, to prepare yourself, to be able to listen without responding. Too many people these days want to listen to respond. They don’t want to listen to understand.”

Logan Square salon Barbara & Barbara has a class with Safe In My Chair scheduled for Feb. 20 (other stylists are welcome to attend; see the salon’s Facebook page for tickets), and Logan Parlor is in the process of scheduling training with Smith. Both businesses offer gender-neutral pricing, meaning the amount patrons shell out for a trim is based on the length of their hair and the time it takes to cut it, not their gender.

“As a gender nonconforming trans person myself, I have struggled in the past with gender price discrimination in salons and was unable to maintain short haircuts because I wasn’t able to throw down $60, not including tip, every four weeks,” said Séa Lawrence, 31, salon supervisor and front desk manager for Barbara & Barbara. “After becoming comfortable with myself and my gender identity and comfortable with the stylist I had been seeing, I expressed my beliefs, and she has since changed the way she operates her salon.”

“I believe that salons that structure their services based on gender would do better by their clientele and for themselves if they, too, recognized that one, the gender spectrum is broad, and two, in a gendered lens, women shouldn’t have to pay more than men to have good hair,” Lawrence said.

Similarly, Katy Roxbury, 30, who wears her hair short, was looking for a place where she felt comfortable after years of getting her hair cut at chain salons.

“I think the biggest thing is just comfort level [at Barbara & Barbara],” the Lincoln Square resident said. “I can come in, I can sit on the couch, I can relate to people that I see around me, I can relate to people that I see cutting hair, so it’s kind of a community, I guess. Even if I’m only here every four weeks or every five weeks, it’s a good time. I’m not stressed out about getting my hair cut, which before is what it amounted to.”

Lauren Kieninger, a co-owner of Barbara & Barbara, which operated as a gallery space before opening as a hair salon in 2010, believes the salon’s gender-neutral price structure has been vital to their success.

“It is kind of across the board just promoting gender equality and education on that, so other communities that might not understand gender politics and things like that, they’ll come in and ask us questions like, ‘Well why do you charge the same for short hair on men and women?’ ” said Kieninger, 28. “And it’s like, ‘Well, why should they be charged differently if it’s the same cut? It’s just on a different gendered person.

“The LGBTQ community really understands it and has always embraced us, and that has been part of our mission statement from the get-go is working specifically with the LGBTQ community. However, it’s opening up all communities to understand the issues surrounding gender, not only in the beauty industry but just in general.”

Serpe and DiGrazia said they wanted the focus of Logan Parlor to be on education for their stylists and for their guests. They also want it to be a place where they can connect with the community.

“The biggest for me was to have that education being able to be implemented through the salon to help the girls grow,” DiGrazia said. “I wanted to be a good mentor to them, and I wanted them to feel confident that whatever walks through the door that they can handle. … There was no space I wanted to work in—we had to create it.”

“But also there’s an initial complete understanding that gender isn’t binary,” Truax said. “That’s huge. And that hair doesn’t have gender but that it is a representation of who we are. And so like, to be able to just be thoughtful about like, ‘Here’s how I want to present myself, can you make my hair help me do that?’ That’s huge.”

Lawrence believes more salons will follow in the footsteps of Logan Parlor and Barbara & Barbara.

“I do believe that as people are becoming more aware of a gender-neutral culture and community that more salons are adopting less gendered payment structures,” they said. “There aren’t many of us yet, but we’re out there.”

For a complete list of Chicago salons that have been vetted by Safe in my Chair, click here.

@RianneCoale | rcoale@redeyechicago.com