Buzz’d creates affirming cuts for Oregonians

Tara Elkin: 

[Sounds of scissors clipping hair and music]

Do you ever go, like, backpacking or anything then? 

Client:

I have not gone backpacking. 

Tara Elkin:

Oh, okay. 

[Sounds of scissors clipping hair]

As a hairstylist, you have to be able to achieve something that someone is visualizing for themselves in their head. 

I am Tara Elkin. I am a hairstylist at Buzzed Hair Co., and my pronouns are she/her, and I like to cut hair a lot.

So visually Buzz’d Hair Cutting Co., it’s, it’s a little funny because all the walls are black. 

[Elkin laughs]

Not all of them, most of them, but it has a theme of a honeybee. So we have some black walls, some white and some yellow. And to me that just makes it feel more of a welcoming space. You don’t see these plain white doctor office scenery and feel to that, and it just makes you feel a little bit more comfortable. 

I’ve gone backpacking once, it’s a lot harder than I thought it was gonna be. 

[Elkin and her client laugh together]

I got into cutting hair because I used to cut my own hair a lot, and I would do my own color a lot. And I was pretty scared to go to hairstylists because they didn’t really do what I liked, or they didn’t do what I asked for. So I thought I could achieve that by going to beauty school.

I chose to work in a welcoming space for queer individuals. I am queer myself, I am bisexual. So to me, it seemed like a lot of salons that I worked at, a lot of salons that I got haircuts from, were very much one way of thinking and weren’t very open to outwardly, you know, presentation.

So for gender-affirming haircuts, the best way to describe that is that it’s having a hairstyle that helps the person feel exactly how they feel on the inside and showcasing that on the outside as well. So it can be as simple as going from long hair to short hair, and that makes the person feel a lot better about themselves. It can be more complex where maybe they identify more as masculine and they want a shorter, masculine haircut. Same with feminine styles. Maybe they want something in between and that can be various different styles as well.

I specialize in mullets and shags and any type of alternative haircut that you typically wouldn’t maybe be able to achieve at a different salon. 

So the way I like to do mullets is more of a modern mullet where maybe the top is very textured, has a lot of movement, makes the curls pop out, and then you carve out the ear, which is basically taking the trimmers over the ear so that it takes away all that hair around the ear. And then the back, I like to leave it long with lots of layers, make those curls pop out, make the layers pop out, and it just looks really good on any type of hair.

So my moment of truth with becoming a hairstylist and working at a gender-affirming hair salon is that I wanted to be able to have a space for people to feel completely themselves. Every day, pretty much, I have clients that come in say they’re nervous about getting their haircut because they’ve had stylists, unfortunately, cut their hair badly, not in the way that they wanted, in a more traditional way than they wanted. And to me, that gives me the purpose of gaining their trust as a hairstylist and providing them that service that they’re really looking for, really wanting, and making sure they feel safe while getting a haircut, and return back to me each time again.