I was getting a haircut earlier this week and got curious about the trimmer my barber (or hairdresser or hairstylist; unsure what they are called nowadays) was using on my head. It was an unusually quiet one. Turned out to be a Wahl. He couldn’t stop praising it.
That opened up a longer conversation. He mentioned an article he’d read about how veteran hairdressers sometimes develop thumb pain from years of rapid scissor work. The behavioural science nerd in me briefly wondered if he was talking himself into a problem he didn’t have. Thankfully he clarified he wasn’t experiencing any such pain. Just thinking ahead.
Enthused by my interest in how exceptionally quiet the trimmer was, he then showed me two pairs of scissors.
His old pair (the one with the black grips in the picture) had a smaller gap between the thumb and finger grips. Like most hairdresser scissors probably have.
His current pair, a $500 Sam Villa, had a noticeably bigger gap between the two grips.
The design, he explained, reduces how much your thumb moves with each snip.
A tiny difference in isolation, but across hundreds of snips a day, over years, it adds up.
This is the kind of thing I find myself drawn to, the intersection of behaviour, design, and everyday products. Not flashy innovations, but the quiet ones.
Someone noticed that hairdressers’ thumbs hurt. Someone paid attention long enough to redesign a better scissor grip. And now there’s a product that lets people do their job for more years, with less pain. Respect!
