SUPER-BARBERS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14041, 26 April 1920, Page 6

SUPER-BARBERS.

"I have just come from my barber," writes Mr Douglas Newton in the "Daily Chronicle." He is a pleasant barber, with the manners of a leader-writer, so mystical and restrained. But all the same I am a little melancholy. Do I, after all, miss the thrill? \ In America barbering is thrilling. When I put the top of myself into the hands of the artist 'of that cult I recognised I was not in for haircutting, but adventure. In the first place, their barber shops are not as ours. Mine is—well, no matter; theirs is a temple. It is a palace of whiteness and glass; marble and mosaic and'airiness; electro-plate and electric fittings. i When I went in I went in not casually, but with awe, There was something so austere and solemn about the place. Then the chair intimidates. It is a swinger and a tilter. It is an elaborate thing of padding and nickel. It is a dentist's chair, with all its gifts but none of' its horror. It is well away from any basin, in the centre of the white floor, and the white vested priest beside it swings it and tilts it, and me in it, without moving himself in the elaborate process through which he put my head. Just an ordinary plain haircut! It can't *be done in America or Canada. One doesn't get a crop, one gets a symphony. The' hair at the temples is machined, and so is the hair at the back of the neck. Then the head is swathed in hot towels, oil shampooed, and sometimes "violet rayed." And there are other things, too, an entire orchestration of them. And the barber is not a mere man with clippers. He is a super-fellow with a touch of dogmatic infallibility. He does not suggest "Would you care for a scalping massage, sir ? lean recommend . . . ." He tells you out of the calm cloud of his artistry, "I'm going to give you a marshwort electrolysis, and after that a yellow cross douche for that nasty nap in the hair." " It takes a strong-minded man to resist that assault by assertion. And the head isn't the. end of things, either. At the slightest weakness on your part the barber beckons from one of bis—well, side-chapels, and a -brisk and imperturbable manicurist comes forward. There are manicurists in all barber's shops; they are artists, like their masters, and perform miracles on the nails with hot towels, scented baths, unguents, steel weapons, and orange sticks. All the while the,barber is still busy on your scalp. .■ Even while a shoe-shine expert is busy on your feet, also, for at an imperious beckon one of these experts has come from a comer, propped your feet up on extending rests, and is hard at work.