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

Introduction: beauty under lockdown

Hair and beauty salons may be thought of by many as sites of frivolous aesthetic pursuits, which are fun and luxurious to enjoy, but ultimately non-essential. They are represented in Western popular culture as sites of vanity, and workers are frequently portrayed as gossips and as relatively low-skilled, aligned with stereotypes of the bimbo and the high school drop-out, or the struggling entrepreneur (Scanlon 2007). Beauty practices are often theorised in terms of a ‘beauty industrial complex’ (Berkowitz 2021, 261), and though there is recognition in these accounts beyond an agent/victim binary, the implications of beauty practices for people’s sense of self is often overshadowed by the focus on the cultural force of beauty norms. As I examine in this article, with COVID-19 lockdowns leading to the temporary closure of many salons across the world, a subset of Western media discourse on salon closures in 2020 trumpeted the potentially ‘liberating’ effects of these closures. This genre of media article failed to account for the role of salons in some people’s lives that goes beyond mere ‘surface’ concerns, or indeed how we might understand this with more depth. These views also occlude the labour that is performed in the salon space beyond aesthetic work. To tease out some of these obscured dynamics, I draw on a survey conducted with 383 salon clients and workers in Australia about their experiences of visiting/not visiting and working/not working during COVID-19, conducted over eight weeks from July to September 2020. The analysis I provide focuses only on the responses from clients in order to examine two related but intertwined research questions. The first is: how clients felt about their experiences of visiting salons changing as a result of COVID-19 (such as the space of the salon becoming completely unavailable). The second is: how this change disrupted beauty regimes from the perspective of clients.

This study connects with prior research that has been done on salons, much of which has focused on the ‘emotional labour’ performed in these spaces (Sharma and Black 2001; Toerien and Kitzinger 2007; Cohen 2010; Harness, Jamie, and McMurray 2021), extending from Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) germinal concept. There has also been some consideration given to ‘body labour’ in nail salons (Kang 2010), and ‘aesthetic labour’ in hairdressing and barbering (Chugh and Hancock 2009; Sheane 2012; and Barber 2016). What can be drawn from this prior research is that the salon encounter is not narrowly about managing surfaces – workers are required to perform a great deal of additional labour beyond technical aesthetic maintenance. Salon workers often must deal with issues far outside of what might be expected in the job and these issues are rarely touched on – if ever – in formal training (McCann and Myers 2023; Page, Chur-Hansen, and Delfabbro 2022). Starting from recognition that beauty salons are sites of work beyond aesthetic surfaces, this article builds on feminist theorisations of beauty such as Maxine Leeds Craig’s insight that, ‘Beauty is political’ and that beauty practices are ‘simultaneously sites of oppressions and pleasures’ (2021, 3). While this paradox of beauty is well understood within feminism, the implications are rarely drawn out in relation to salons specifically. I contend that the social space of the salon ought to complicate our understanding of people’s engagements with beauty regimes. That is, if we understand that the labour performed in the salon is ‘more than skin deep’ (Paulson 2008), we must also ask: how ought we understand the salon as a key site of beauty culture beyond or alongside the engagement with beauty norms and expectations?

The lockdowns imposed in many areas during the COVID-19 crisis have presented unique periods within which people have been confronted with disruptions to many of their regular grooming and beauty routines that are normally outsourced to salon workers. Gaining insight into how people feel about their access to salons being interrupted by COVID-19 offers the opportunity to consider the meaning of these sites to people, that may not be otherwise captured by a common-sense notion held by some that disruptions were necessarily liberatory. In this article I first examine how this genre of discourse played out in mainstream Western media in 2020. I then describe the survey that I conducted in 2020, before outlining the general findings, followed by a detailed discussion of the themes that were identified in the survey open comments of clients. These themes cover: anxiety about the COVID-19 virus and visiting salons, worries about the wellbeing of salon staff, relief about not having to keep up appearances during lockdown, experiences of anguish around self-presentation in lockdown, and impacts on wellbeing beyond aesthetic concerns. The results demonstrate a complex picture of what the interruption of ordinary beauty regimes meant for people beyond simple ‘liberation’. This article offers insight into experiences of visiting/not visiting salons during COVID-19 lockdowns. The findings encourage us to theorise about the personal implications of beauty practices that go beyond agency/structure debates.

Disrupted beauty regimes in 2020

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, there was a nation-wide lockdown imposed by the Federal Government in Australia. The lockdown spanned from mid-March to the end of May and meant that beauty salons offering services including manicures, hair removal, makeup, and other beauty treatments were forced to shut (Prime Minister of Australia 2020a). Somewhat controversially during this period hairdressers and barbers were allowed to remain open with new ‘COVID-safe’ measures in place (Prime Minister of Australia 2020b). However, hair and barber services were later forced to shut in the state of Victoria (VIC) between July and October 2020 due to a second wave of cases in the region and subsequent state-wide lockdown (‘How We Work: Victoria’ 2020).

Across the world in 2020 lockdowns saw salons closed or subject to restrictions, and as the pandemic unfolded there was media coverage of the implications of this. Media ranged from accounts of closures affecting salons as businesses (for example: Lebsack 2020; Valenti 2020), to methods for conducting beauty routines at home in lieu of salons (for example: Dunn 2020; Stewart 2020). Of interest to this study, a number of opinion-based articles also appeared in Western media about the potential benefits of lockdowns in various parts of the world for freeing people from normative expectations of beauty maintenance (for example: Justich 2020; Wakeman 2020; La Ferla 2020; Kirwan-Taylor 2020; Cunningham 2020; Kale 2020; Madison 2020; March 2020). These articles were published in primarily USA-based online newspapers and magazines with worldwide readership, such as The New York Times and Harper’s Bazaar. These articles argued that COVID-19’s disruption of beauty regimes was cause for celebration and should be embraced – by women in particular – as an opportunity to let go of restrictive and costly routines.

These articles proposed that in terms of beauty ‘lockdown’ might in fact mean ‘freedom’. For example, writing for NBC News Jessica Wakeman (2020) argued: ‘this is a great opportunity to collectively recalibrate our expectations of feminine beauty, freeing both women and girls from centuries of discomfort, insecurity and external control’. Or as Ruth La Ferla (2020) wrote in The New York Times, ‘As the days of quarantine drag on, many women are reveling in the relinquishment of high heels, painful waxes and constricting garments’. In this genre of articles, ordinary beauty and grooming regimes were discursively positioned as uncomfortable, restrictive, and expensive, while lockdown was presented as an opportunity for change.

Salons were implicated in these articles as a key part of many people’s ordinary grooming. For example, Kerry Justich (2020) writing in Yahoo!Life noted that liberation was due to the fact, ‘the businesses that provide these ritualistic services are temporarily unavailable’. While some articles, like Bridget Marsh (2020) writing for Harper’s Bazaar, noted that beauty practices were simply changing during lockdowns but were not being entirely relinquished, even in these reflections the stress was on how women had been ‘liberated’ from previous efforts put into their routines. This element of the discourse around salon closures/restrictions connects with a long history of feminist theorisations and critiques of femininity and beauty. Culturally the salon has often been positioned as a key site for the reproduction of beauty norms (Gimlin 1996; Black 2004). Yet as Leeds Craig also identifies, the state of academic feminist debate about beauty today is ‘lively and unsettled’ (2021, 7). From this basis how are we to make sense of the claims of these popular media articles that positioned isolation from beauty salons as ‘a good thing’ (Kirwan-Taylor 2020)? The aim of this article is to ‘unsettle’ the genre of popular conclusions about the closure of salons as liberatory, to use this claim as a jumping-off point for investigation in order to draw out more nuance about the implications of visiting/not visiting salons during COVID-19.

The survey

Ethics approval was obtained for the survey at the University of Melbourne, Australia (Ethics ID: 2057013.1), and explicit consent was obtained from participants. The survey was designed using Qualtrics, was available online only and open for eight weeks, from July 27 to September 21, and was split into a section for clients of salons and a section for salon workers. Participants were required to be over 18 and currently residing in Australia to participate. The section for clients was completed by all participants given that workers are also often clients either at their own or other salons. Given the breadth of the survey, the data focused on in this article concerns only the first part of the survey about accessing salons as clients.

The survey included questions for clients such as how often they would usually visit salons (pre-COVID), what services they would access, how visiting salons made them feel, the kind of things that they disclose to workers, and how the COVID-19 crisis had changed their experiences of visiting salons. The client section of the survey consisted of closed categorical questions except for two open-ended questions: one for clients to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on visiting salons and one for clients on other reflections about beauty and grooming during COVID-19.

The survey was advertised via social media (Twitter and Facebook), a dedicated project website, various networks (including academic staff newsletters, local community networks on Facebook, and salon worker specific forums on Facebook), Hair and Beauty Australia, the Hair Stylists Australia Union, and Australian salon contacts.

Notably the Australian state of VIC was in a full second lockdown for the entirety of the survey period, including closed hairdressers, barbers and beauty salons, while the other states had mostly closed borders but eased restrictions. The geographic unevenness of the COVID-19 outbreaks and restrictions is important to note for contextualising the fact that not every client was living through the same conditions during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, and specifically not during the survey period. Yet notably the survey asked client participants to reflect on how the crisis had impacted their experiences of visiting salons since the beginning of the pandemic lockdown measures (defined in the survey as 22 March 2020), and everyone across Australia had experienced the same first National lockdown rules. As such there is a broader specificity to be extrapolated from the results about client experiences in the Australian context.

Descriptive statistics were collated for the closed questions, but given the overrepresentation of cisgender women and Queer, Bisexual, Pansexual, Lesbian, Gay and Asexual (QBPLGA) people in the sample compared to the general population, a chi squared analysis was conducted for the closed questions relating to feelings about salons pre- and post- COVID-19 to determine any significant differences relating to gender or sexuality. An iterative exploratory approach to thematic analysis was used for the open questions, which involved familiarisation with the content of the comments, before refining into grouped themes (Guest, MacQueen, and Namey 2012). Repeated patterns across comments were identified (Ryan and Bernard 2003); inductive coding meant that the approach to determining themes emerged from the comments rather than being imposed from above (Kirby et al. 2021). The identified themes were cross-checked and refined with the help of a research assistant. Only the analysis for the first of the open questions, for clients, is included in this article for brevity.

Findings

Demographics

In total there were 383 participants, ranging in age from 18 to 77, with an average age of 39. Women (90%) – and specifically cisgender women (89%) – were the primary respondents, people born in Australia (75%), and people of Anglo-European ethnicity (91%). The majority of respondents were also straight identified (67%), however we might note that the number of responses from QBPLGA people (33%) were disproportionately high compared to estimates of the non-heterosexual adult population in Australia as 3.2% (Wilson and Shalley 2018). There were respondents from every state and territory in Australia (VIC, NSW, SA, QLD, TAS, ACT, NT, WA), though the majority were located in VIC at the time of the survey (57%) (see Table 1).

Table 1. Overview of survey respondent demographics.

Overall sample
n = 383
Age
Range	18–77
Average	39
Gender Identity
Woman	343 (90%)
Non-Binary (NB)	1 (<1%)
Genderqueer (GQ)	1 (<1%)
Man	35 (9%)
Transgender (Trans)	2 (<1%)
NB, Trans, GQ total	7 (2%)
Did not disclose	2 (<1%)
Sexual Identity
Straight	256 (67%)
Other	125 (33%)
Queer	46 (12%)
Bisexual	58 (15%)
Pansexual	9 (2%)
Lesbian	16 (4%)
Gay	16 (4%)
Asexual	8 (2%)
Did not disclose	2 (<1%)
Location
NSW	68 (18%)
VIC	219 (57%)
ACT	38 (10%)
TAS	6 (2%)
QLD	31 (8%)
NT	1 (<1%)
WA	8 (2%)
SA	10 (3%)
Location Type
Urban	302 (79%)
Rural	61 (6%)
Regional	18 (5%)
Did not disclose	2 (<1%)
Place of Birth
Australia	288 (75%)
Other	91 (24%)
Did not disclose	4 (1%)
Ethnicity
Anglo European	348 (91%)
Other	35 (9%)

Visiting salons

Most respondents reported that they were regular customers of hair salons (65%), but people also mentioned accessing barbering, manicures, day spas, facials, eyebrow maintenance, spray tanning, hair removal, makeup services and more. Prior to COVID-19 most respondents accessed salons once every few months (44%), followed by once a month (26%) (see Table 2).

Table 2. Overview of salon attendance as clients, based on responses to the questions: ‘Prior to COVID-19, what hair or beauty services did you most often seek out as a customer? (Please select all that apply)’; and ‘Prior to COVID-19, how frequently (on average) did you visit salons as a customer?’.

Salon attendance as client
n = 383
Beauty service
Hairdressing	250 (65%)
Eyebrow and/or eyelash maintenance	113 (30%)
Manicures and/or pedicures	102 (27%)
Waxing	67 (17%)
Skin treatments incl. facials	59 (15%)
Barbering	23 (6%)
Day spa services	22 (6%)
Other	14 (4%)
Spray tanning	10 (3%)
Makeup	10 (3%)
None – N/A	7 (2%)
Did not disclose	68 (18%)
Frequency
Once every few months	167 (44%)
Once a month	98 (26%)
2–3 times a month	32 (8%)
Never	8 (2%)
Once a year	4 (10%)
Once every few years	4 (10%)
1–2 times a week	2 (<1%)
3–5 times a week	1 (<1%)
Did not disclose	67 (17%)

Responses from clients

Client survey responses revealed that while some people felt alleviated pressure to present in certain ways, not being able to visit salons also had a negative impact on others. Participants were asked about their feelings related to visiting salons both prior to (Table 3) and following COVID-19 (Table 4).

Table 3. Overview of client feelings by gender and sexuality based on responses to the question: ‘Prior to COVID-19, how did visiting salons make you feel? (Please select all that apply)’.

Client feelings about visiting salons prior to COVID-19 x gender and sexuality
Pre-COVID-19	n = 383** Total % reporting	n = 33 % of Cisgender Men	n = 341 % of Cisgender Women	n = 7 % of NB, Trans, GQ	n = 256 % of Straight	n = 125 % of QBPLGA
Happy	54.05	33.33	56.30	42.86	53.75	55.47
Relaxed	37.08	27.27	38.71	14.29	41.50	28.91
Calm	28.46	18.18	29.91	14.29	28.46	28.91
High self-esteem	25.33	15.15	25.81	42.86	24.11	28.12
Social	24.54	15.15	25.22	28.57	26.09	21.88
Connected	24.02	12.12	25.51	0.00	23.32	25.78
Safe	18.80	6.06	19.94	14.29	15.81	25.00
In control	17.49	12.12	17.89	14.29	17.79	17.19
Relieved	14.62	6.06	15.25	28.57	14.62	14.84
Stable mood	13.32	15.15	13.49	0.00	14.23	11.72
Anxious	11.75	15.15	9.97	71.43*	5.93*	23.44*
Neutral/no feelings	8.09	18.18*	7.33	0.00	9.09	6.25
Low self-esteem	4.18	3.03	3.81	28.57*	1.19*	10.16*
Disconnected	1.31	0.00	0.59	28.57*	0.40	2.34
Frustrated	1.04	0.00	0.88	14.29*	0.40	2.34
Unsafe	0.78	0.00	0.29	14.29*	0.00	1.56
Moody	0.78	0.00	0.88	0.00	0.40	1.56
Out of control	0.52	3.03*	0.29	0.00	0.00	1.56
Sad	0.26	0.00	0.29	0.00	0.00	0.78
Lonely	0.26	0.00	0.00	14.29*	0.00	0.78
Angry	0.26	0.00	0.29	0.00	0.00	0.78
Other	2.61	0.00	2.64	14.29	1.98	3.91
Did not disclose	18.54	27.27	17.89	14.29	20.16	14.84

* Statistically significant values for chi-square analyses based on p = 0.05 at one degree of freedom

** Note: there were two respondents who did not disclose gender or sexuality included in this total

Table 4. Overview of client feelings by gender and sexuality based on responses to the question: ‘If your experience of visiting salons changed because of COVID-19, how did this change make you feel? (Please select all that apply)’.

Client feelings about visiting salons after COVID-19 x gender and sexuality
Post-COVID-19	n = 383** Total % reporting	n = 33 % of Cisgender Men	n = 341 % of Cisgender Women	n = 7 % of NB, Trans, GQ	n = 256 % of Straight	n = 125 % of QBPLGA
Happy	3.39	6.06	2.93	0.00	3.16	3.91
Relaxed	2.35	0.00	2.64	0.00	2.37	2.34
Calm	3.13	0.00	3.52	0.00	2.77	3.91
High self-esteem	1.04	3.03	0.88	0.00	0.40	2.34
Social	1.83	3.03	1.76	0.00	1.98	1.56
Connected	3.92	3.03	4.11	0.00	4.35	3.12
Safe	5.74	6.06	5.57	14.29	5.93	5.47
In control	3.13	9.09	2.64	0.00	2.77	3.91
Relieved	4.44	0.00	4.69	14.29	3.56	6.25
Stable mood	1.31	0.00	1.47	0.00	1.58	0.78
Anxious	19.84	15.15	20.82	0.00	20.16	19.53
Neutral/no feelings	13.32	9.09	14.08	0.00	14.23	11.72
Low self-esteem	10.44	3.03	10.85	14.29	8.70	14.06
Disconnected	16.97	6.06	18.18	0.00	13.04	25.00*
Frustrated	18.80	6.06	20.53	0.00	17.00	22.66
Unsafe	8.36	9.09	8.21	14.29	6.72	11.72
Moody	3.13	3.03	3.23	0.00	3.16	3.12
Out of control	10.18	0.00	11.14	14.29	7.91	14.84
Sad	20.10	6.06	21.70	14.29	18.58	23.44
Lonely	4.96	3.03	5.28	0.00	4.35	6.25
Angry	1.04	0.00	1.17	0.00	0.79	1.56
Other	5.48	6.06	5.28	14.29	5.14	6.25
Did not disclose	29.77	51.52*	26.98	57.14	30.43	27.34

*Statistically significant values for chi-square analyses based on p = 0.05 at one degree of freedom

**Note: there were two respondents who did not disclose gender or sexuality included in this total

A chi squared analysis revealed that prior to COVID-19 cisgender men were more likely to report feeling out of control or neutral/no feelings regarding visiting salons. Straight-identifying people were less likely to report feeling anxious or low self-esteem while QBPLGA were more likely to report these feelings. Non-binary, trans and genderqueer respondents were more likely to report feeling anxious, low self-esteem, disconnected, frustrated, unsafe and lonely. Conversely, a chi squared analysis of reports post-COVID-19 illustrated few significant differences between groups, except for cisgender men being more likely to not disclose any feelings, and QBPLGA people more likely to report feeling disconnected. These results indicate that for queer and gender diverse people salons can be generally fraught spaces, however that QBPLGA people felt more disconnected post-COVID-19 might suggest something interesting regarding sexual identity and salons, as I have indicated elsewhere (McCann 2022).

Analysis of the first open question that followed the closed questions for clients provides greater understanding of how these reported feelings specifically relate to their experience of visiting (or not being able to visit) salons. This question asked participants for any further details about their experiences of visiting salons as a result of COVID-19. Thematic analysis was conducted on the 236 comments left for this open question. Through this process five themes were identified as detailed below. The comments were coded for multiple themes where applicable, and some comments were also coded as ‘neutral’ responses. The results reveal conflicting accounts of feelings of liberation from beauty regimes during this period.

Thematic analysis and discussion

Salon safety: anxiety about the virus and visits

Of the 236 comments, 28% mentioned anxiety related to the COVID-19 virus in their considerations of whether to visit salons or not. These comments stressed the importance of safety precautions in determining whether and when they would visit, or had already visited, salons, such as ‘I missed the experience but the feeling of wanting to be safe from covid outweighs the disappointment’ (cisgender woman, 30, asexual, VIC). Many of these comments noted that while they missed the salon experience, they did not believe that it was essential – marking haircuts and other beauty services as relatively frivolous concerns compared to the broader concern of the pandemic, such as ‘Hair can wait’ (cisgender man, 32, gay, VIC).

Some of these comments were also from people who did attend salon appointments in the period, given that during the first lockdown hairdressers and barbers remained open. Many of these respondents found the event stressful and not like their usual experience, such as, ‘I was very anxious the entire time and wanted to get out asap’ (cisgender woman, 35, gay, VIC). These comments weighed salon services as very low priority or relatively insignificant compared to the risk of contracting COVID-19. For some of those who did venture into salons the threat of COVID-19 loomed large over them as a persistent and present risk: ‘The experience was uncomfortable and disconnected, I was anxious about being there and the hairdresser was not sociable’ (cisgender woman, 30, bisexual, QLD). In part what these comments reveal is the general mental burden of living through the pandemic, which requires undertaking constant risk assessment. There have been general reflections on the energetic drain of the pandemic on people, that is, the increased fatigue of emotional and mental overwhelm due to the stream of news (Kormelink and Gunnewiek 2022). The survey data also specifically suggests we should consider the weight of having to mentally calculate risk – whether and how to attend face to face appointments and so on – in the pandemic context.

Many of the concerns about safety also focused on the corporeal nature of the salon encounter, for example one comment that, ‘Eyebrows involve hands on my face and very close face to face contact so didn’t feel safe nor necessary’ (cisgender woman, 39, asexual, VIC). These kinds of comments, and general issues raised around cleanliness and safety, hint at an aspect of salons which has been identified in previous research: salons involve work managing client bodies (Gimlin 2007; Black 2004; Kang 2003; Kang 2010), and as such they are sites of corporeal entanglement. The salon is a space where the organic and inorganic, chemical and bodily – hair, skin, nails and more – mix. The corporeality of salon work might be understood as a form of ‘dirty work’, that is, jobs involving bodies that often carry with them low or tainted status (Hughes 1951; McMurray and Ward 2014; Rivera 2015; R. Simpson and A. Simpson 2018). Some research suggests that because salon work is ‘dirty work’, workers tend to downplay this aspect of their jobs (Gimlin 2007). As the survey data suggests, the significance of the salon’s corporeality is intensified in the context of a pandemic. As others have noted, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified awareness of the bodily, co-presence and touch (Dahiya 2020; Tullett and McCann 2022). Rather than being able to ignore the body labour undertaken in the salon, the threat of viral transmission pushes proximity and connection between bodies to the forefront of concern.

Job keepers: worries about salon staff

Notably the client fears expressed in the survey were largely focused on the risk that visits posed to themselves, rather than acknowledging the fact that salon workers are at the highest risk, having to have contact with multiple clients throughout the day. However, a small percentage of comments (15%) did express concerns explicitly about salon staff during the period, such as, ‘I felt worried and anxious for my hairdresser and her ability to make enough money because I know she is a migrant and all her family is in Korea’ (cisgender woman, 36, bisexual, ACT). These comments noted concern not only about the health of the workers (‘Worried about my Hairdresser’s health’ (cisgender woman, 61, straight, VIC)) but also frequently commented on the ability of salon workers to survive financially, such as ‘Felt bad for my hairdresser missing out on income’ (cisgender woman, 42, straight, ACT). These clients expressed worries about how the changes brought about by COVID-19 were affecting their beloved workers: ‘I missed seeing my hairdresser and also worried about the impact of the restrictions on him’ (cisgender woman, 41, bisexual, VIC). Notably the Australian Federal Government had announced a ‘Job Keeper’ financial support supplement for many workers in March 2020, swiftly after the beginning of the pandemic. Some survey comments noted this, for example, ‘Was relieved for the barbers at my regular shop that they were able to secure jobkeeper and remain employed’ (cisgender man, 26, bisexual, SA). This meant that many employers were able to access government payments for full-time, part-time and casual staff. However, this did not resolve all financial difficulties for the salon industry, with many still facing various difficulties navigating business within the precarious context.

No salons, no problem: no more keeping up appearances

25% of the comments explicitly included suggestions that the period had brought with it a relief from ordinary social norms of self-maintenance. Some of these comments highlighted that for them visiting salons was something that they disliked pre-COVID-19, so felt happy to be free from regular expectations. In line with the chi-squared analysis detailed in Table 3, QBPLGA respondents detailed anxiety being part of the salon experience pre-COVID, such as ‘I don’t miss hairdressers at all. I find them anxious spaces at the best of times so I didn’t want to risk the virus by going back’ (cisgender woman, 42, queer, VIC). These kind of comments were emphatic about their dislike of the salon experience. ‘I literally hate hair cuts and am somewhat happy to avoid’ (cisgender woman, 29, lesbian, VIC).

However more broadly than this many of the comments simply emphasised that because of the restrictions on services and the move to working from home for many there was less pressure to ‘keep up appearances’, and that this brought with it a welcome relaxation around grooming and beauty norms. This included reflections on the fact that everyone was seemingly impacted in the same way, ‘I felt partly liberated but partly due to the fact that everyone else was doing the same thing’ (cisgender woman, 45, straight, QLD), or ‘I felt that it was OK to have unkempt hair, wear relaxed clothing and no make-up because expectations of how we looked and dressed changed with COVID’ (cisgender woman, 59, straight, ACT). For some this had profound implications: ‘I questioned the role these beauty rituals had in my life’ (cisgender woman, 24, queer/bisexual, VIC).

This relaxation of expectations that some people felt also opened the opportunity for experimentation or changing style. For example, various comments mentioned letting grey hair grow out, ‘I completely changed my look after years of looking the same (cut all my hair off by myself and stopped dying it and let the grey come through)’ (cisgender woman, 48, bisexual, WA), and ‘Due to not going at my usual times I decided to grow out my grey hair and am continuing this to see what it will look like’ (cisgender woman, 37, straight, ACT). Along these lines, learning to cut hair at home was also a feature, ‘I bought some clippers and a hand mirror and started teaching myself how to cut my own hair’ (cisgender man, 33, straight, VIC).

These comments show an association between salon regimes and normality, with COVID-19 signalling a break with the ‘normal’ (Stephens 2020). These reflections indicate that some people have felt freer to experiment with their style, grow out greys, and so on. The feelings of ‘liberation’ indicated by some of the comments suggest the heavy burden that some people feel in trying to ‘keep up appearances’, and indeed that the pandemic interrupted beauty business as usual for the better for some people.

A cut to self-esteem: the anguish of self-presentation

Yet not all survey respondents felt liberated by the changes and salon closures. 36% of the comments included some reference to self-esteem and negative emotional impacts specifically related to not being able to maintain appearance. These comments included reflections on how their changed lockdown looks made them feel out of control and in general how the change to their grooming and beauty regimes made them feel bad about themselves. For example, some respondents noted how bad their changed appearance sans-salons made them feel, ‘The bad regrowth especially paired with my grown out eyebrows made me feel ugly and as though I’d let myself go’ (cisgender woman, 29, not straight, VIC), or ‘I have a loss of some self esteem without regular hair cut, beard trim’ (cisgender man, 34, straight, VIC). Comments also specifically noted control, and the loss of it, as central, such as ‘Being unable to attend the nail salon once every 3–4 weeks made me realise how important those routines were to giving me a sense of control over my appearance and my self esteem. The disruption to my routine was destabilizing and I missed the self-expression that it allowed’ (cisgender woman, 27, queer/bisexual/pansexual, VIC), or, ‘felt less about myself because I couldn’t control my appearance’ (cisgender woman, 44, straight, VIC).

In addition, commenters reflected on their feelings once salons re-opened, ‘Also, the day after barber shops opened up again in my area, I went for a visit. The haircut was conducted safely, and I felt exhilaratingly great after being freshly shorn!’ (cisgender man, 43, gay, VIC). Or as another suggested, ‘I felt in control and happy that I could have eyelash extensions because I they make my life easier, they make me feel better about myself’ (cisgender woman, 26, pansexual, VIC). We might wonder then whether the eyelashes in fact act as salve to something larger than simply conforming to beauty norms.

We can turn here to the first study psychological study in Australia to examine the impact of the COVID-19 closure of beauty salons on mental health and distress levels, which found that ‘dysmorphic concern’ was a mediating factor (Pikoos et al. 2020). The higher that participants ranked on the ‘dysmorphic concern questionnaire’, the more likely that they were to report not only distress about the closure of salons but also had higher expressions of anxiety, depression and stress measures. However, a limitation of this study is that it misses broader consideration of what salons might mean to people beyond purely aesthetic outcomes, or indeed, what the aesthetic might mean to people beyond conforming to beauty expectations. The measures offered by Pikoos et al. (2020) only consider the extent to which participants have internalised societal messages about beauty norms, but do not consider the multi-dimensional role that not only salon spaces, but rituals of self-grooming and self-curation more broadly, play in maintaining a sense of control and indeed a sense of self.

Losing oneself: impacts beyond the aesthetic

The final theme demonstrates how a narrow focus on self-esteem and aesthetics misses a large part of the picture. 51% of the comments highlighted how not visiting salons negatively impacted their sense of self more deeply than just related to appearances.

Multiple comments emphasised a range of sub-themes relating to impacts of the inaccessibility of salons beyond the aesthetic. This included comments on salons as the only place clients could have time to themselves, and away from their children or other domestic commitments. Here, salon closures were felt as a loss of sanctuary from the ordinary routines of life. It also included reflections that people associated the aesthetic changes with other negative periods or habits in their life pre-pandemic. For example, respondents noted associations between mental turmoil and being unable to keep up appearances: ‘I was in an unhealthy mental space when my hair was long, so having longer hair is now associated with a period of immense stress and depression’ (cisgender woman, 26, queer/bisexual, SA), or, ‘The minute lockdown started again, I resumed nail biting which has been a source of great physical and mental pain’ (cisgender woman, 26, queer/bisexual, VIC). As one comment even noted, ‘Self-styling takes me back emotionally to times in the past when I’ve been financially insecure (which I guess I am again now!) and the anxiety that comes with that’ (cisgender woman, 46, asexual, VIC).

Numerous others felt that not visiting salons was related to a felt sense of lost identity, such as: ‘Getting my hair done properly by my barber and stylist helps me feel more like myself and more representative of my sexual identity. I miss that’ (cisgender woman, 34, queer/bisexual, NSW). These comments strongly suggest the salon is as much a site of identity curation as a place where norms of beauty are sometimes reinforced. As Madison Moore suggests, beauty practices are not always about harsh capitulation to norms, but rather, can be about creative ‘fabulousness’, a way for marginalised persons to claim their identities (2018, 18). While some comments certainly emphasised the bad experiences they have had in salons – for example, the difficulty of navigating gender expectations as a queer woman in the salon space – others suggested that salons were the only spaces they could have procedures done that made them feel like themselves.

Crucially, many of the comments in this theme also talked about the social aspects of losing their salon connections, again highlighting the emotional labour performed in salons. These comments included, ‘I specifically missed the stylist I visit as we have developed a great social relationship’ (cisgender woman, 35, straight, VIC), ‘I missed the connection’ (cisgender woman, 49, straight, VIC), and ‘I missed the social interaction with my hair dresser who I have known for more than a decade’ (cisgender woman, 50, straight, NSW). Importantly the relation noted by respondents was not simply social, but also physical: ‘…the touching of my hair and scalp was so welcome and so worrying all together - realised and commented to my hairdresser that this was the first human touch I’d had in months!’ (cisgender woman, 60, other, VIC), highlighting the entanglement of body work with emotional labour as noted in previous literature (Gimlin 2007).

These comments allude to the salon as a social site, the significance of which is intensified within a pandemic lockdown context where sociality has been heavily reduced. Furthermore, research shows hairdressers are likely to encounter disclosures of intimate partner violence (Bebee et al. 2018) and receive a myriad of emotional disclosures from clients including mental health concerns, terminal illness, grief, suicidal ideation, gender transition, family breakdown and more (Page, Chur-Hansen, and Delfabbro 2022; McCann and Myers 2023). Salon workers frequently refer to themselves as ‘makeshift counsellors’, and while they are obviously not trained nor remunerated as professional therapists, we ought to think further on what this pseudo-therapeutic relationship might mean to some people. These survey comments call us to reflect on what it means to lose another space of social connection, in this case also specifically a place of human touch, in the very difficult time of a pandemic.

Conclusion: rethinking the beauty salon

For many people, salons are sites that involve more than merely tinkering with outer appearance. There are deeper insights to be had about what occurs within salons, and theoretical implications for feminist engagements with questions of beauty. While some survey respondents felt relieved and ‘liberated’ by COVID-19 lockdown interruptions to normal beauty regimes, which included closed salons, others felt this break more negatively as a loss of connection, touch, and control over self-identity. What can be gleaned from these reports is not that beauty salons are necessarily sites of empowerment, nor that accounting for agency in beauty regimes should altogether trump concern over how social expectations of appearance circulate. Nor is this an argument for salons to be considered ‘essential services’. Rather, this is an attempt to think about the complex significance of the salons for different people, leaving us in a messier place than simply understanding the closure of salons as liberating. The findings of this study call for us to complicate the agency/structure binary further, to see that sites of beauty might sometimes not be about beauty at all.

There are several important limitations to this study, which include the small sample size, the skew toward Anglo-European respondents, and the geographic unevenness of pandemic restrictions at the time of the survey. In this way the proportion of people who felt liberated versus portion who felt negatively impacted by salon closures ought not be understood as a representative ratio. The small sample sizes of each group by gender and sexuality also mean that the statistical analyses should be taken as a starting point for further investigations rather than offering definitive insights (for example, into the meaning of salons for non-binary, transgender and genderqueer people). Furthermore, the fact that some salons (hairdressers) were allowed to remain operating during the first lockdown may have impacted how liberated survey respondents felt given that they could still access these spaces. We might postulate that the lack of responses to the survey from cisgender men – as well as the non-disclosures about feelings specifically – is indicative of the relation between gender and beauty regimes, but future studies may wish to attempt to recruit greater numbers of men to investigate further. Despite these limitations the survey responses provide some insight into how some people felt about salon closures and the ways that we might think about the impact of salon closures beyond aesthetic implications.

We must ask ourselves what is missed in cultural assumptions about the beauty salon as frivolous, or claims that the closure of such spaces yield liberation. The survey responses call for us to rethink the beauty salon as a dynamic space that means different things to different people, that identity and not only ‘norms’ should be a key point in any analysis of accessing beauty services, and that the loss of these sites is not necessarily ‘liberatory’ for all. We must continue to grapple with the fraught and sometimes contradictory feelings that circulate around these sites which are intensified in times of disrupted life routines. It is only through stepping back from traditional accounts of beauty norms and popular assumptions about salons and their workers that we may be able to offer more holistic accounts that do justice to the experiences of identity, bodies and emotions bound up with these spaces.

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.