For some time I have been fascinated by the number of hairdressers in Finland. Where do they all come from and whom do they all perm? I still have the Yellow Pages from when I lived in Jyväskylä, in Central Finland. There were 146 hairdressers listed in the Jyväskylä region in 1998. Compare that to the 24 dentists or the 51 electricians. (Or the 6 psychotherapists. Or the 1 theatre. One!)There seems to be the same peculiar overclipping in Leppävaara, the district of Espoo where I live now. To check this properly, I decided to relive the days of secondary-school geography fieldwork to see what the statistics show.
This is a raw list of the shop-fronts that I pass on my 15-minute walk home from the railway station. It does not account for the main shopping centre nor the main road, so is not a survey of Leppävaara as such, but let's take it as random and therefore vaguely typical. Get your bar charts ready. Here goes:
1 aquarium,
1 beauty parlour,
1 chemist,
1 diving-equipment shop,
1 doctor's surgery,
1 electrical engineer,
1 estate agent,
1 flea market,
1 gift shop,
1 gym,
1 osteopath,
1 solicitor's office,
1 tattoo and body-piercing parlour,
1 Thai massage parlour
2 banks,
2 dental surgeries/laboratories,
2 restaurants,
2 supermarkets,
2 video rental shops
3 kindergartens,
3 pizza take-aways,
3 pubs
and
8 hairdressers
Granted, Leppävaara is quite well-stocked if you're looking for a Quattro Stagioni to go, a tropical fish for your collection, and a quick rub-down. But that ratio of hairdressers is alarming. And I'm sure there were more of them a couple of years ago, before the beauty parlour and the osteopath moved in.
So what's it all about? I looked around. I did not detect a particular coiffuredness among the local populace (many of whom were sitting on benches, bottles in hand). I remain puzzled.
However, this little outing did lay to rest another idea that I had, which was that Finland also boasts an unseemly wealth of florists and undertakers. But maybe they're on the other side of the tracks.
5 comments:
More importantly, where do they go when they die? Maybe the answer is ... Finland!
uikrlf - the sound of 10,000 haircurlers falling on someone's head.
i have an answer for you, c.d.: they, in fact, go to düsseldorf. speaking as a sometime helsinki flâneur used to that scissor density, i was not kidding about the dorg being home to haircuts and real jobs - i believe most of the barges you see on the rhein are needed just to ship in the hairgel only for the subsection of guys who wear g-star shirts. the style du jour here (among other things) is wildly, depressingly homogenous.
i know this is DOA clunker material without statistics. i am on the research case.
cmzdwyi - the sound made by the ever-popular-in-Germany Suck Kut, the revolutionary hair-cutting device. (betraying my age with flair, here.)
Kanikiski, There can never be too many hairdressers, because at some point the one you really like is sure to raise their prices alarmingly, or give you a bad haircut, or go travelling, or be surly for no good reason, so always good to have options to fall back on.
i meant kanikoski of course!
I truly believed, when I first arrived here, that Finns must be simply hair-obsessed. There was no other accounting for the proliferation of coifferies.
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