Reopening, With Barber Lucky Longo

Lucky Longo is the owner of A Lucky Cut, a non-traditional barbershop that offers a wide range of services and styles – short hair, long hair, shaves, beard trims and kids cuts. Like all barbers and stylists, Lucky has been shut down since March, but now she’s scheduling appointments again.

At the age of 15, Lucky remembers a formative experience when her mother took her from their home in Yonkers, where her mom owned a beauty parlor, into the city for a short cut at a barber shop in Astor Place.

“It was right before high school,” she remembers. “I was trying to find out my identity. I was pretty much out already to myself. My mom would try really hard to give me the cut I wanted. But if you know me, I like what I like. She would get pretty close.”

But Lucky was thwarted that day.

“They passed me off to this guy. He was a hairstylist, not a barber,” she says. “I needed a barber to cut my hair because it’s a different kind of precision. It’s this weird gender thing. I remember feeling really annoyed because that was my whole purpose of going there with my mom, to do this other type of thing that she couldn’t give me. I was looking at the guy next to me getting this really cool fade and I’m like, my god I want that thing.”

The experience, terrible as it was, eventually inspired her to provide a more inclusive and non-gendered approach to hair cutting – a paradigm shift that she brought to Beacon.

In this episode Lucky talks about her philosophy of barbering, beards during Covid and what clients should expect when they enter the shop after the reopening.