The Hairdresser | Etleva Vishkurti
The smell of fruit shampoo and nail polish fills the air. In the background you can hear a stereo softly playing, alluring you with its tunes. Wooden square-shaped shelves holding various decorative items hang on every wall, where all eyes can see.
It is a cold Friday morning in the beginning of April, but the atmosphere inside Eva’s Salon is warm and comforting. Etleva Vishkurti stands in the middle of her apartment-sized salon near the Tirana city center, ready to begin another day of hard work.
Etleva cleans her workplace and equipment and patiently waits for clients. Her usual customers are women between the ages of twenty and forty years old, with men, teenagers, and elders being part of the minority. She says that she treats all of her customers the same, no matter who they are or how often they ask for her services.
“Meeting new people and dealing with them is part of the job,” Etleva says. “‘The client is king’ as they say, but some clients can be difficult, like when they ask for things that are impossible in the moment. I listen to their requests, of course, but there is only so much I can do with their hair!”
At last, the first customer for the day enters through the door. Etleva asks them what they wish to do. If they want to work on their hair, she wraps a small towel around their shoulders and washes their hair first, using fruit scented shampoo and conditioner. Then she wraps the towel around their head and sits them down on the rotating chair, where she begins to style their hair. As long as the hair dryer is not on to block her voice, Etleva usually likes to make conversation and get to know them better.
Etleva is 35 and working two full-time jobs; as a hairdresser and a mother of two children. After studying for one year and a half to become a hairdresser, she has spent the past 13 years in the profession. She says she opened her salon only three years ago, but she had been working for seven years straight somewhere else then three more years at the same place where she did her studies.
“My job is something that I love to do, especially hair dyeing,” Etleva says. “I have always been obsessed with mixing dyes, even though they are chemicals. It needs a sort of instinct to find the right three or four colors to mix in order to get that one perfect tone and warmth that the client wants for their hair.”
Etleva reveals that she has experimented with almost all the colors on her hair before, but it was one of her old friends that helped her realize her passion. “While experimenting on her hair at home, I realized that I should continue doing it. Now there is nothing else in the world I would rather do.”
When the day is over, Etleva says that she enjoys nothing more than to get back to her family and spend the evening with her husband and children. She mentions that her daughter and son often visit her at work and help around, but neither has a passion for hairdressing like her.
“The most we have decided is that if my daughter goes into the medical field, she will study aesthetic medicine. But the last thing I want to do is force my passions onto my kids. They will find the thing that they love to do eventually, just like I did,” Etleva says.
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Arklejda Oshafi is a somphore student majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Bulgaria. She had always wanted to know more about the woman that would occasionally do her hair, and the journey of getting to know her better and writing an article about her was both enlighting and thrilling.
