My daughTER, My COSMETOlOgIST

EDITOR’S MESSAGE
My daughter,
my cosmetologist
A series of haircuts leads me to reflect on parallels between dentistry
and the beauty professions
INSCRIPTIONS Editor
Eric K. Curtis, DDS, MA
“Dad, tip your head this way.”
My daughter Anica Rose gently pressed a finger to
my right temple. I leaned left and held steady. Anica
dipped her long, narrow comb into the gray thatch
over my cocked ear, caught a lock scissor-style between two fingers and squeezed. She slid her shears
over the stubby tuft bristling from her determined
cigarette grip and snipped two millimeters. The
wispy clippings fluttered like dust and settled over a
fine silver mound collecting on the floor.
I’m a willing guinea pig. This year I spent a number
of Friday afternoons getting my hair cut and my
nails done, grateful that Anica’s progress through
cosmetology school demanded less subcutaneous
commitment on my part than her sister’s phlebotomy
class. Sitting in the barber chair, cut off from my cell
phone, I had ample time, even with the semi-rhythmic distractions of washing and drying and soaking
and dyeing, to ruminate and draw comparisons.
It is said that beauticians emerged when the first
human became self-conscious, but we reveal a subconscious impulse to look good every time we stand
up and smooth the wrinkles out of our pants. The
compulsion to make a good impression seems to be
coded into our system, perhaps obedient to some
limbic imperative to create order, promote selective
advantage, or defy entropy.
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INSCRIPTIONS | Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, August 2013
Beauty magnifies identity. (“Americans may have no
identity,” wrote French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “but they do have wonderful teeth.”) By her
own admission, pop star Katy Perry takes ninety
minutes each morning to become Katy Perry. People
even conflate beauty with morality. “It is better to be
beautiful than to be good,” Oscar Wilde joked, “but
it is better to be good than to be ugly.” Case in point:
The attorney for convicted Florida sex offender
Debra Lafave successfully argued in 2006 that his client was too pretty for prison.
As prime vehicles for conveying beauty, hair and teeth
share an intimate psychological intersection. Both connote youth and vitality, which in turn signal success,
ability, and competence. The 1997 movie The Beautician and the Beast, starring Fran Drescher and Timothy
Dalton, imagines an American cosmetologist invited
to teach in an Eastern European country. “Oh, you
Americans and your positive thinking,” a local bureaucrat tells the beautician. “There are some situations that
a big-toothed person cannot get you out of.”
“Hair and teeth,” proclaimed the late, great James
Brown, “a man got those two things, he got it all.”
Waylon Jennings sang the same song in his own
words: “When I was young I didn’t have a care/
Bright white teeth and yeller hair/ Now I don’t look
quite as sweet/With bright white hair and yeller teeth.”
“Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth
get things handed to them on plates,” said novelist
Doug Copeland.
“Maybe it’s the hair,” television critic Tom Shales
said. “Maybe it’s the teeth. Maybe it’s the intellect.
No, it’s the hair.”
It turns out that dentistry is cosmetology’s cousin,
albeit more than a few generations removed. It’s not
because beauty school, like dental school, delivers
practical clinical training with procedures and competencies, and a board exam featuring written and
clinical components. It’s not because cosmetological procedures feel almost medical, complete with
protective wear and instruments to disinfect. It’s
not even because current turf battles have turned
to bleaching teeth. Rather, it’s because dentists and
barbers share a common ancestor.
Here’s the genealogy. Medieval Europeans evolved a
multi-tiered system for treating illness based on the social status of the health care provider. Physicians diagnosed and prescribed medicine or “physic.” But many
of the practical aspects of doctoring fell to Christian
monks. Ministering to the sick was considered a
proper Christian duty, and monks routinely performed
minor surgery, set bones, and applied poultices.
A 1092 papal decree banned monastic beards, so
monasteries called in barbers to shave the monks
and cut their hair in the prescribed tonsure. Barbers
began assisting monks at their medical ministrations.
The Church, in turn, began to worry that monasteries were practicing too much medicine and not
enough religion. So the 1163 Edict of Tours,
proclaiming that surgery,
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as the shedding of blood, was not a Christian thing
to do, restricted monks from practicing surgery.
Monks turned over their surgical duties to barbers.
Soon barbers were cutting cataracts, removing gallstones, lancing abscesses, letting blood, and extracting teeth. By the 1200s barber guilds, and then barber-surgeon guilds, were forming to teach and foster
the demanding surgical disciplines. By the 1300s a
French physician named Guy de Chauliac proposed
the development of a specialist surgeon, which he
called, variously, dentator or dentista, to treat teeth.
The red and white striped pole still visible at the
barber’s front door supposedly represents barbering’s
bygone surgical services. While the overlapping skill
sets of beauticians and barbers lead me to the careless professional commingling you see here, the two
groups see their respective métiers as quite distinct.
In some places these days, they reportedly fight over
who gets to display the barber pole.
Aside from historical congruencies, beauticians/
barbers also share important professional aspirations
with dentists. For one thing, hairdressers, like dentists, aim to make people feel better, and feel better
about themselves. “You work one-on-one with another human being,” explained Vidal Sassoon, “and
the object is to make them feel so much better and
to look at themselves with a twinkle
in their eye.”
“I think,” Joan Crawford once said,
“that the most important thing a
woman can have—next to talent, of
course—is her hairdresser.”
Clients like to trust and confide in
their hairdressers, sharing secrets
with their beautician that they divulge
nowhere else—except perhaps their
dental professional. (Novelist and
screenwriter William Goldman likes
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INSCRIPTIONS | Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, August 2013
“I have no misconceptions about my dentist because
when I go to my dentist I see what he does,” Ben
Kingsley explained. “Nobody can really understand
the process of acting because we don’t want them
to.” Benjamin Franklin warned, “Beware the young
doctor and the old barber.”
People imagine that professionals in both spheres
possess a certain focused single-mindedness: “Never
ask a barber if you need a haircut,” wrote journalist Daniel S. Greenberg, a quote also attributed to
Warren Buffett. “If beauty is truth,” comedian Lily
Tomlin asked, “How come no one has her hair done
in the library?” Countered aphorist Mason Cooley,
“If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office
would be full of luminous ideas.”
“
Dentists and barbers,
of course, may both
seem a bit threatening
to tell the story about how he developed the idea of
the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man from conversations
with his periodontist.) The Clairol Loving Care hair
color brand developed a famous series of commercials beginning in 1956, ending with the tag line,
“Only your hairdresser knows for sure,” that resonated with consumers for the next half-century. “Talking to your hairdresser,” Andie MacDowell said, “is
almost like talking to your therapist.”
Both dentists and hairdressers/barbers, who routinely touch their clients in socially invasive ways, must
work hard to put people at ease. In each calling, rapport precedes intimacy. “A barber is the only person
whose conversation you can follow even though he
talks over your head,” E. B. White wrote. (Question:
When one barber cuts another barber’s hair, which
one does all the talking?)
“Blessed are they who hold lively conversations with
the helplessly mute,” Ann Landers wrote, “for they
shall be called dentists.”
Dental and grooming professionals alike find their
duties easily imagined by the public.
Dentists and barbers, of course, may both seem a bit
threatening. Think of Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd
in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; think
of Steve Martin’s Orin Scrivello, DDS, in Little Shop
of Horrors. But both professions also may be inspiring. David Beckham said, “I always wanted to be a
hairdresser.” Mark Spitz said, “I always wanted to be
a dentist.” Tiebreaking bonus quote: “I didn’t want to
be an actress,” said Sofia Vergara. “I wanted to be a
dentist, but you never know what life will bring you.”
Lest you still think cosmetology (a word that still reminds me of the Soviet space program) is markedly
inferior to dentistry, think of Paul Mitchell and Vidal
Sassoon. How many dentists are household names?
When Anica completed her program, she gave a
speech at graduation in which she quoted her dad.
Anica has a steady clientele now at a salon where she
rents space, which will help her understand firsthand
such concepts as overhead and time management,
as well as fund her Arizona State University business studies. For a hundred years dentists have been
begging patients to come back every six months, but
my best advice for both Anica and my dental hygienists about keeping clients happy comes from this old
barber’s maxim: You can scalp a customer only once,
but you can give him a haircut every two weeks.
Dr. Curtis practices general
dentistry in Safford. He is
an accomplished editor,
author and professor. Dr.
Curtis is Editor of Inscriptions. His email address is
Editor@azda.org
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