Illustration by Josh Kramer / DCist/WAMU

Part of what made Kim Burkart’s job so thrilling was the people.

“I think it was always exciting to be on 14th Street,” she says. From protests to changing businesses along the flourishing commercial corridor, Immortal Beloved, a salon on 14th St. NW near the U Street Metro stop, saw it all. To Burkart, a colorist at Immortal Beloved for eight years, it was perfectly located: halfway between downtown and uptown, accessible to people coming to and from work.

But when it permanently closed its doors in June, Immortal Beloved joined a spate of salons and spas that were forced to close in the D.C. area over the last year because of the pandemic. (Immortal Beloved will reopen as a barbershop soon, focusing exclusively on men’s hair, per PoPville.)

While salons and barbershops have been able to operate in some capacity since last May, it can be hard to get customers comfortable enough to come in for a hair appointment in an enclosed space, Burkart, 35, says. The evidence is in your home, and mine – how many times have we asked our roommates or spouses to trim our hair over the last year, or complained that we’re looking a little shaggy?

The losses haven’t been relegated to any one part of the city. Queen Nails in Dupont Circle, Salon Cielo on Connecticut Ave NW, and Bogart Salon in Georgetown all shuttered since last March, among many others. When the Aveda Institute at Gallery Place closed last July, PoPville commenters bemoaned the loss of an affordable place to get a haircut, typically by students still learning the trade.

For Betsy Purves, a 34-year-old D.C. mom, the loss of Kidville, a chain of salons with a location in Bethesda that closed in August, the feelings of loss over something seemingly as ordinary as a haircut surprised her.

“It is the normal, banal stuff that you don’t think about having to adjust to, then all of a sudden you have to find a way around,” she says. She regularly brought her three-year-old son to the barber, where she says stylists were gentle and experienced at giving a restless kid a haircut, placing her son in a chair that looked like a firetruck.

“I’ve never seen anyone work so quickly and gently and able to work so well with a flailing toddler under their hand. They were magic,” she says. Since the closure, she says she’d been able to hire a stylist who used to work at Kidville to cut her son’s hair outside.

At Immortal Beloved, Burkart says she saw a wide range of clients, from students to politicians.

During Barack Obama’s administration, she says, First Lady Michelle Obama even stopped in.

Burkart herself colored the hair of Sally Yates, then the acting attorney general, around the time President Donald Trump fired her for pushing back on his administration’s travel ban to several majority-Muslim countries.

“It wasn’t that we were just geared towards one type of clientele, and the staff ranged in age from 17 to 55,” Burkart says. During the Trump administration, Burkart remembers housekeeping staff members for the First Family coming in – and they would sometimes share salacious secrets about their work life.

“I think especially in the first two years under Trump, they had to let it out somewhere,” she says.

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Filed Under: covid-19, hair salons, nail salons, pandemic closures, spas,