Black Hair Salons in Britain: Skill, Enterprise and Community

Pinkie's salon, Brixton, 2002

The hairdresser was known as Pinkie. Her hair was pink, her home was decorated in pink, and her clients wore a pink satin shawl when Eileen Perrier photographed them. Perrier’s 2002 series Blessing portrayed people who visited her own hairdresser’s home salon in Brixton. Commissioned for The Photographers’ Gallery’s Brixton Studio exhibition, the portraits recorded a small business through the people connected to it. Different hairstyles appeared within a shared setting, with the same shawl linking the sitters. ¹

The exhibition placed these photographs alongside an earlier record of the neighbourhood: Harry Jacobs’s portraits of residents, including women who had recently graduated from hairdressing school. Together, the images offer a view of hairdressing as an occupation and a relationship. There were qualifications to gain, customers to serve and places in which people became familiar to one another. Pinkie’s domestic setting also challenges a narrow picture of what a salon looked like. Skilled commercial work could take place within a home, with a distinctive atmosphere created by its owner. ¹

Creating places where Black customers belonged

In 1955 Carmen Maingot opened a salon in North Kensington. Fellow Trinidadian artist and designer Althea McNish decorated its rooms. The connection between hairdressing and design was deliberate: the interior helped define the experience customers would receive. Rose Sinclair’s research for the Horniman Museum places Maingot alongside Winifred Atwell, whose Brixton salon offered an attractive, comfortable environment for Black women. These businesses brought specialist knowledge into visible commercial spaces, responding to customers whose needs were poorly understood by many existing hairdressers. ²

For Caribbean migrants in the early post-war years, much hair care had taken place at home. The development of specialist salons created further choices about who did that work and where. Sinclair describes Atwell’s salon as an open-plan space with a television and coffee machine, intended to make clients feel comfortable and pampered. Such details matter as much as a shop sign. An appointment could offer expertise, pleasure and a sense that the surroundings had been designed with the customer in mind. Salon owners were selling an experience as well as a finished hairstyle. ²

Beauty, respectability and the freedom to choose

The growth of Black hairdressing also took place within arguments about what counted as beautiful. Historian Olivia Wyatt identifies advertisements in the 1960s magazine Flamingo that presented tightly curled hair as a problem requiring alteration. Photographs of Roy Lando’s salon showed images of women with straightened and carefully arranged hair. These sources connect commercial styling with ideas of respectability, and reveal how the language of beauty could carry racial judgements even within publications addressed to Black readers. ³

Black Power and Black women’s organising challenged the denigration of African features and gave natural hair a powerful political meaning. Yet the history cannot be reduced to the belief that every straightened hairstyle expressed the same intention. Wyatt cautions against broad assumptions about consumers and examines tensions within competing definitions of Black beauty. A salon served people negotiating these pressures through individual choices. Fashion, racial pride and expectations of respectable appearance could meet in the same appointment. The historical question is how customers gained the freedom and support to decide how they wanted to look. ³

Hyacinth Jarrett: turning expertise into teaching

The West Midlands offers a substantial example of hairdressing expertise becoming educational work. Hyacinth Jarrett came to England from Mandeville, Jamaica, in 1956. After nursing, she established Jarrett’s Hairdressers in 1970 and developed expertise across different hair textures. Her profile at the West Bromwich African Caribbean Resource Centre records a business that operated for forty years. She also wrote The Black Hairdressing and Beauty Training Manual, setting down knowledge accumulated through years of professional practice. ⁴

Jarrett advised on training and helped develop a course in Black hairdressing at Birmingham City College in Handsworth. Her work extended into distance learning and international educational connections. This placed a practitioner in discussions about what other hairdressers should know. The salon could generate knowledge that travelled into a classroom, a manual or another business. Jarrett also helped found the West Bromwich African Caribbean Resource Centre in 1985. Her career linked enterprise, education and community responsibility, showing how the skills developed through running a business could support wider local institutions and the prospects of younger workers. ⁴

Learning a craft through different routes

Charlotte Mensah’s training combined salon work with formal study. In a government interview, she recalled attending the London College of Fashion one day a week during a youth training scheme in 1986–88, alongside work at Splinters. She then moved between workplaces to broaden her skills. Her route into business was gradual: she rented a chair in Kilburn, built a clientele and worked from home to be near her son before opening high-street premises in 2003. ⁵

Securing those premises was itself a struggle. Mensah recalled being repeatedly told a space was unavailable, only for a white friend to receive a different answer when he enquired. She confronted the landlord with evidence of her business finances. Her account connects the professional ability to serve customers with the separate problem of obtaining a place to work. She also described using her later role on an apprenticeship route panel to challenge assessment timings that were inadequate for treating Black hair. Practical experience could expose problems in supposedly neutral arrangements. ⁵

Vernon François remembered a more improvised beginning in Huddersfield. Unhappy with the results of family hair sessions, he began practising braids, twists and locs on household materials, including curtain fringes and a mop head. He started styling professionally at fourteen and later worked in a salon on London’s Oxford Street. His account makes the learning process visible: repeated experimentation, curiosity about texture and the determination to make his hands do what he imagined. ⁶

François subsequently described conversations with clients about their frustration and lack of confidence when styling their own hair. Those exchanges informed his approach to explaining products through clear visual signs and different texture categories. The connection between stylist and customer therefore involved teaching as well as completing a service. Knowledge acquired through handling hair had to be translated into something another person could understand and use. His emphasis on confidence also challenged the repeated suggestion that textured hair was inherently difficult or lacking in possibilities. ⁶

From a rented chair to a family business

Ama Safo began renting a chair in a shared Tottenham salon in 1991. Working beside barbers and other hairdressers helped her learn styles and build a local clientele. She had acquired hairdressing skills while growing up in Ghana and later studied at the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London. In 2001 she opened Ama Hair Salon on St Ann’s Road, needing more room for equipment and customers. The move required further investment in the space as well as continuing work on clients’ hair. ⁷

In a 2022 interview, Safo described using personal consultations, word of mouth, leaflets and messages to maintain customer relationships. Her son Silas, a barber and stylist, helped with recruitment, operations and marketing. Running the salon required these organisational tasks alongside creative work. She also spoke frankly about long, physically demanding days. Her account grounds entrepreneurship in the effort required to sustain it: managing staff, communicating with customers, keeping skills current and finding enough energy to continue. The pleasure of seeing a client leave more confident existed alongside the demands of making the business work. ⁷

The skilled work of keeping a customer

Errol Douglas offered a similar emphasis on relationships when asked how to build a successful salon. In a 2014 interview, he stressed listening both to clients and to the people working in the business. Supporting a team and supporting customers required different skills. Many of his clients had stayed with him since he opened his salon in 1998, and some had known his work for longer. Their continued custom connected technical ability with trust built over time. ⁸

Douglas also described mentoring younger talent and finding inspiration beyond his own workplace. His creative projects involved collaboration with colourists, photographers, make-up artists and stylists. That range helps explain why hairdressing belongs within the history of skilled design work. A successful result depends on judgement, communication and the ability to adapt, as well as the execution of a technique. It also makes the team visible. A celebrated stylist’s name may appear above the door, but sustaining the salon involves other practitioners whose knowledge and working relationships contribute to what customers receive. ⁸

Making a record of everyday artistry

On 7 May 2001, the Victoria and Albert Museum invited people to have their hairstyles and nail art photographed at a Day of Record. Curators Carol Tulloch and Shaun Cole documented an event attended by around twelve hundred people. Photographs entered the museum’s collection, while talks examined the historical, political and aesthetic meanings of the styles being recorded. Visitors brought knowledge and creativity into a national museum through their own appearance. ⁹

The research also led to Tools of the Trade: Black British Hairdressing, an exhibition using oral history and objects to examine hairdressers and barbers working between 1947 and 2001. Tools and testimony provided evidence of how work was done and how practitioners understood it. This approach gave historical value to skills that might otherwise disappear when a business closed or a stylist retired. A hairstyle is temporary, but photographs, equipment and recorded memories can preserve the decisions and techniques behind it. They make it possible to study ordinary professional practice alongside celebrated innovations. ⁹

Changing what training includes

Despite generations of specialist expertise, training across the wider industry continued to require reform. In August 2021, awarding organisation iTEC and VTCT announced changes intended to make knowledge of Black hair and skin part of the core content of its qualifications. It described work with an expert panel for the 2021–22 academic year and recognised that existing assessment arrangements could allow essential knowledge to be overlooked. The announcement identified a problem in what qualifications required learners to demonstrate. ¹⁰

The organisation also committed to training educators responsible for delivering the new content. Changing a syllabus meant considering the preparation of teachers and the questions used in assessments, alongside the techniques taught to students. These were announced reforms, rather than evidence that every training provider immediately delivered the same standard of education. Their significance lay in treating knowledge of different hair textures as part of ordinary professional competence. Specialist salons had developed that knowledge through practice; the wider qualification system was being asked to make it an expected component of learning. ¹⁰

The consequences of uneven provision were apparent in Cardiff that autumn. Stylist Sian Jones, who specialised in braiding and extensions, had recently opened a salon near the city centre. Speaking in reporting by ITV Wales and S4C Hansh’s GRID, she described strong demand but difficulty finding the further training she wanted locally. Travelling to England for courses would add expense. She questioned how more salons could develop if suitable training remained difficult to obtain. ¹¹

Jones also explained why a professional salon mattered even where people already offered services from home. Some customers wanted a salon environment, and people were travelling outside Cardiff to find braiding services. The gratitude of customers reinforced her decision to open. Her testimony gives the national training debate a specific geography: a skill may be available somewhere in Britain yet remain costly or inconvenient to access locally. For both a stylist seeking further education and a customer seeking an appointment, distance could shape the choices available. ¹¹

Peckham salons find new ways to reach customers

By 2023, stylists interviewed by Londonist were describing how social media changed the organisation of their working day. At Omena Unique in Peckham, Auntie Omena explained that bookings helped her anticipate income instead of spending hours outside waiting for customers. TikTok and Instagram brought people to the business, while appointments made the day’s workload more predictable. A new way of finding a salon could therefore alter both its marketing and the use of a stylist’s time. ¹²

The interviews also revealed cooperation between practitioners. Auntie Christine said that she preferred to send a customer to a colleague who could confidently achieve a requested style rather than take work she was not ready to perform. Omena described learning about new styles from her daughter and practising on her. Knowledge moved between generations and across neighbouring businesses. The older salon community was adapting to new technology while retaining personal networks of advice and referral. These accounts show an industry capable of change through the decisions of ordinary owners, workers and customers. ¹²

A history made through daily practice

In September 2026, Ladbroke Hall hosted Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters, marking forty years of her work in hairdressing. Curated by Madeleine Haddon, the exhibition brought together photographs, film, personal objects, archival material and sound. Its accompanying programme considered business, identity and the salon as a cultural space. The format recognised that a long career could be understood through the relationships and working environments surrounding it, as well as through finished hairstyles or professional honours. ¹³

Bringing these materials into an exhibition also changed what could be preserved for future audiences. Personal objects and records of practice offered ways to connect the visible result of hairdressing with the effort of building a lasting business. The exhibition’s attention to community placed the people around a practitioner within that story. A salon’s history includes the passing on of skills, the growth of working relationships and the decisions that allow an enterprise to continue. Giving those processes space in the historical record makes the achievement more substantial, and the people who sustain it more visible. ¹³

Sources

[1] The Photographers' Gallery. Brixton Studio: exhibition account, including Eileen Perrier's Blessing series; October–November 2002.

[2] Horniman Museum and Gardens. Rose Sinclair, Winifred Atwell: Hair Entrepreneur; 3 October 2022.

[3] Historical Research, Oxford University Press. Olivia Wyatt, ‘Black is beautiful’: gender, pigmentation and political blackness in modern Britain; Published online 5 August 2026; November 2026 issue.

[4] West Bromwich African Caribbean Resource Centre. Management Committee Profiles: Hyacinth Jarrett.

[5] Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. Black History Month: A conversation between Jennifer Coupland and Charlotte Mensah; 25 October 2022.

[6] Fashionista. Steph Saltzman, Lupita Nyong'o's Hairstylist Wants to Transform the Way People Think About Curls: interview with Vernon François; 10 November 2017 (displayed page date; URL is dated September 2016).

[7] Melan Magazine. How I set up and run my thriving Black Hair salon: interview with Ama Safo; 26 February 2022.

[8] Salons Direct. Errol Douglas: interview; 2 December 2014.

[9] University of the Arts London Research Online. Carol Tulloch and Shaun Cole, Day of Record, Nails, Weaves and Naturals: Black British Hairstyle and Nail Art; Event held 7 May 2001; retrospective research record.

[10] iTEC and VTCT. iTEC and VTCT announcement on integrating Black hair and skin into core qualification content; 16 August 2021.

[11] ITV News Wales, with S4C Hansh's GRID. Zahra Errami, Salon owner speaks of frustration around accessing training for Black hair; 14 October 2021.

[12] Londonist. Jade Rozana, How ‘Peckham Aunties’ Jumped On Social To Promote Their Hair Salons; 24 April 2023.

[13] Ladbroke Hall. Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters; Exhibition held 8–13 September 2026.

Sources checked on 23 October 2026.