How Much Is Too Much For A Haircut?

It’s different for everyone, but this could be it.

Recently I got a haircut to fix what was a burgeoning unintentional mullet. The experience was normal; I gossiped with my hairdresser about work and Donald Trump, drank a glass of water and was in and out in a half hour. As I paid the $78 to which I am accustomed to, she said in passing, “Our prices are going up. It’ll be $88 the next time.”

I tipped her and left, thinking to myself as I walked down the street that maybe $88 is too much. Something about the extra $10 pushing the haircut closer to $100 gave me pause. Also, the hair was fine, but a teensy bit shorter than I wanted and I reasonably can’t walk back in and ask for the hair to be put back on my head, so there’s that

There was a point in my life when a $50 haircut felt like it was too much. When I moved to New York, everything felt like it cost $20 more and was roughly that much more irritating to achieve; the price of a haircut bumping up from a comfortable $55 to a splurge-y $65 was just another thing I had to deal with for moving to a city where the most logical activities occasionally become a Sisyphean task. Soon, $65 moved up to $75 — closer to $100 than I’d prefer, but not quite. This latest bump feels like it might be the last straw.

Relatively speaking, paying $100 for a service that I cannot reasonably do myself is fine; there are dumber things I’ve spent $100 on in my life. It’s not even a lot of money for a haircut! There are more expensive ones, to be sure.

• Here’s What Getting a $1,200 Haircut Is Like
• Before and After My $700 Haircut
• The $984 Haircut

Any haircut that tops out above $100 feels egregious, though I guess I get it. Rent is expensive, products cost money and the skill of the person cutting my hair is worth a pretty penny, too. But $100 feels like a slippery slope — once I start justifying the cost of a $88 + 25 percent tip haircut once every… six months or so, will I unlock a level in which I feel comfortable spending exorbitant amounts of money on so many other things.

What’s your haircut threshold? How much do you pay for other services that can be really cheap but often are not?

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