No salon, no sanctuary: beauty under ‘lockdown’ in Australia in 2020

Abstract

Across the world lockdowns during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis saw the forced closure of many hands-on services such as beauty salons, hairdressers, and barber shops. In Australia although hair services were allowed to stay open during the first National lockdown, subsequent state lockdowns mandated these grooming services shut to the public for extended periods. There has been much public debate about the necessity – or perceived lack thereof – of grooming services, especially given that hairdressers were permitted to stay open during the first lockdown when many other businesses shut. 2020 saw claims in Western media that the closure of these spaces was ‘liberatory’, particularly for women. This article interrogates this assumption, drawing on data from 383 Australian survey respondents collected between July and September 2020 to look at the impact of salon inaccessibility during the period. While some survey respondents relished the freedom of not having to ‘keep up appearances’, many also reported on the negative impacts of salon closures in terms of connection, self-esteem and identity. This article considers how the site of the salon is considered a transformative ‘sanctuary’ for some and untangles the deeper impact of the closure of these sites on individuals during a crisis.

Keywords:

• Hair
• beauty
• identity
• salons
• COVID-19

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Brendan Churchill for his support and advice on the survey conducted as part of this study, as well as Dr Briony Lipton, Shirley Xue Chen and Dr Geraldine Fela for their work as Research Assistants on this project. I would also like to acknowledge Dr Dylan McConnell’s guidance with undertaking the statistical analysis in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) under a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award grant (DE200100989).

Notes on contributors

Hannah McCann

Dr Hannah McCann is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research in critical femininity studies explores feminist discourse on femininity, queer femme LGBTQ + communities, beauty culture, and queer fangirls. She has published in various journals including European Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018, and her co-authored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures in 2020 available via Bloomsbury.