Many shapes, one talent

“For me, cutting hair is just like doing some freelance design work. You have to understand the client’s briefing and then create something beautiful that they will like and be pleased with.” This is how designer and Trooper Guilherme Santiago relates his profession to his hobby.

Passionate about different forms of art, everything he sees turns into inspiration to analyze trends. “At the cinema, for example, the haircut of a character is not the way it is bychance. There’s a reason for it to look the way it does, just like in graphic design”, he says.

Guilherme has always been creative and hyperactive. When he lived in the countryside, as a child, he liked changing the way things were. That’s why he loved his sister’s dolls, much more than his toy cars, which didn’t give him the opportunity to create other things. They were what they were, and that was that. With dolls, he was able to cut their hair and make new hairstyles.

As a teenager, he would always notice the haircut of actors in soap operas and movies. That was when he decided to cut his own hair, inspired by what we saw.

And that was only the beginning. He went from making experiments on himself to cutting his friends’ hair at University, in 2015. Without advertising or promoting his work on social media, our Trooper got more and more customers because of word-of-mouth. Today, his résumé lists more than 100 haircuts.

“I started cutting the hair of my guy friends, and then my girl friends also started asking me to cut their hair. The funny thing is that today I cut girls’ hair much more. I charge just a symbolic fee because what I do is experimental. I didn’t take any courses, nor did I spend time watching YouTube tutorials. I do it based on what I learned with practice and my aesthetic perception, which is very acute because of my profession”, Guilherme says. He also invests in equipment, such as special scissors and brushes.

He tells us that he seeks to value user experience by creating a natural and informal environment, which makes people at ease at the same time it wains the nervousness that they might have towards the new cut. He also says that people who go to him want to wind down. More often than not, the cuts are made when friends are gathered, in between beers, and a lot of conversation.

Speaking of chatting, there was a lot of it in the photo shoot we had in his apartment. While he cut the hair of other Troopers — why yes, many people who work at Hotmart have already had their hair cut by our designer-slash-hairdresser -, Guilherme told us how he feels when he does this second job. “For real? Insecure. I keep thinking if it looks good, if the person will like it. We cannot Ctrl-Z and undo what’s been done, just like on the computer. Insecurity only turns into pleasure when I stop thinking about it and see that it turned out great in the end.”

Among drafts, illustrations, and scissor cuts, our Trooper proves that fighting for the State-of-the-art is present in a variety of activities, in a variety of shapes.