Kyle Chismar, at his 6-year-old daughter’s request, will be going as a skeleton for Halloween. But, to a certain extent, Chismar wears a costume every day at The Old Bank Barbers in Hampden and The Old Market Barbers in Remington, where he has worked as a barber for around one year.
“I put on a mask of somebody with confidence, ability, and knowledge,” he half-jokes.
But he’s been cutting hair for about three years, and is “feeling more confident.” He has a great deal of ability and knowledge, too; he is a graduate of Avara’s Academy of Hair Design, located in Dundalk. And while he may sometimes reach for a blade and go “never mind,” he said a skilled barber recently told him, “At least you don’t look like you don’t know what you’re doing.” That’s high praise, right?
“I don’t think cutting hair is any different than any other form of art,” says Chismar, 37. “You start off by learning the basics and then find other barbers’ work who you admire to try to replicate to the best of your ability, while finding your own style along the way. You need to constantly be improving and practicing and getting better.”
He’s learned something from most barbers he’s interacted with, including Instagram-famous ones he’s messaged on social media. “They will actually respond to you,” he says, “which I think is mind-blowing.”
Chismar is very aware that he’s still learning. If he gets stuck during a haircut, he’ll ask a more senior barber for help—or give the person a shorter do, he says with a laugh. After all, being a barber is inherently humbling. “You can literally do a cut in the morning that might be the best you’ve ever done,” he says, “and then do a haircut in the afternoon that feels like it could have just been done completely differently.”
However, Chismar says he doesn’t have much experience giving bad haircuts. (That said, he once gave me a haircut, and I got a buzzcut a few weeks later. I assured him it was nothing personal.) He says it’s because he’s “overly cautious.”
“Will you be throwing caution to the wind soon?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I think it’ll just happen organically in a few years.”
By then, he hopes to have continued developing a real feel for cutting hair, to have wrapped his head around why hair behaves the way that it does. This sort of masterful understanding he’s building toward—at the intersection of art, science, and craftsmanship—transcends knowledge he’s memorized about how light, wind, humidity, and more can affect how a haircut goes.
Chismar, “deeply unhappy” in his previous jobs as a teacher and in the casino business, first tried barbering at the suggestion of a good friend who’d gone through something similar. He started barber college and was hooked immediately. It “lit a fire” in him, he says, recalling early days watching the “buzz”—no, not a pun on “buzzcut”—of the classroom or barbershop “come alive.”
He no longer dreads Monday mornings; instead, he has a sense of purpose. As a barber, he feels like he belongs to a “community that produces great things for great people,” a community of artisans in the city who come “from every different walk of life,” he says, adding that he’s “part of this living, breathing thing that is the City of Baltimore.”
He’s also part of a historical tradition. Since classical antiquity, barbershops have been sites of social interaction and public discourse. Additionally, beginning in the Middle Ages, barbers often served as dentists and surgeons. While Chismar does not feel much of a connection to that latter past side of his trade, he sees his role as more than cutting hair, even if he is not bloodletting or leeching. In a way, customers get to “rent a friend,” he says, and watch that friend create something in the moment.
“Hopefully, by going to the barber, you are not only getting a nice haircut, but also having a meaningful conversation, or maybe just time to sit in silence and relax,” he says. “Mainly, people should feel better about themselves when they leave.”
On the other side of the comb and scissor, barbering has given Chismar the ability to explore hobbies like drumming, stand-up comedy, and the card game Magic: The Gathering—and to be with family.
“Time is a currency,” he says, “and barbering has allowed me to spend that currency more on the things I value.”
