Barbershop Confidential: Bad Haircuts, Foreign and Domestic

The search for the perfect cheap haircut is, to a certain degree, a quixotic one. On one level, since Bostonist sports nothing more than a glorified buzz cut, it's hard to go wrong. But on another level, there is frequently much room for improvement. Our last two haircuts have been unhappy studies in this phenomenon.

Luzia's
Broadway between Sargent and Marshall
Somerville
First, we found ourselves in Winter Hill with some time to kill and a shaggy head. Riding our bike up Broadway, we espied what looked like a good, old-time, Italian neighborhood barbershop and decided to go in for the classic experience. What we didn't realize is that right next to the Italian place was Luzia's, a hole-in-the-wall Brazilian salon (not to disparage the Brazilians and their haircutting prowess; Bostonist is a huge fan, as we've said, of Amarildo's in Union Square. After locking up our bike, we inadvertently went into Luzia's and then felt like it would be rude to walk out - besides, we're in the business of trying out different cheap haircuts, so why not? Well, we shoulda just left.

It started out OK: Every Brazilian salon we've been to is presided over by a hostess/manager of sorts, who greets customers, answers the phone, and makes appointments. At Luzia's, this woman was a tall, impossibly blonde, thin, and Barbie-esque person with perfectly tweezed eyebrows and high-gloss lips who made us feel even more scruffy-looking than we already were. She led us to a chair, asked us how we wanted our hair, then began telling another young woman more or less what we had said, but in Portuguese. We were amused when the Portuguese version started to include some touches we hadn't mentioned, like the length of the sideburns, and gently jumped in with some words of Portuguese explanation to avoid that awkward moment when someone says something unflattering about us in another language without realizing we understand.

From there, the haircut went downhill. The hostess lady departed and the haircutting lady, despite having heard Bostonist speak Portuguese passably enough to answer hair-related questions, insisted on trying to speak in English. That, in itself wouldn't bother us, because, well, who are we to stand in the way of someone speaking English? But she really couldn't speak English, so everything she asked would be repeated a couple times in unintelligible English before she broke down and said it in Portuguese. Then, she made the classic amateur barber's mistake: As she did the line-up on our forehead, one side kept ending up higher than the other, so she kept correcting and correcting, and our hairline kept receding and receding, and finally we had to intervene. The result was that for the next three weeks, we had unsightly five o'clock shadow on our forehead. In a word, awful, even for only ten bucks.

Richard's Haircutting
Two Center Plaza
Boston
At the other end of the bad haircut spectrum, Bostonist recently visited what seems to be the only conveniently located barber shop near our office, inside Two Center Plaza (across Tremont Street from City Hall Plaza). At Richard's Haircutting, we were attended to in a deathly quiet, windowless chamber by a gregarious American who would not stop talking. Worse still, he actually turned off the clippers and stopped cutting our hair for several minutes at a time, just so we could hear him finish his story! WTF?!! To add insult to injury, the clippers he was using, although functional, were cranked up to the maximum jiggly rattling setting, so when he touched them to Bostonist's dome, it felt like a little mini-jackhammer. Amazingly, although the haircut was perfectly serviceable, we came away wildly dissatisfied - twenty minutes of prattle and rattle was simply more than we could endure, especially for a whopping $19 plus tip.