Hair salons do everything to attract attention, starting with the name on the sign. Everyone competes in ingenuity and humor to find a catchy name, with puns. Examples in Dijon.
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“Créa’tif, C dans l’Hair, Miss’t’hair, Brun d’Hair, Faudra tif hair, Hair Pure, Rep’hair, Coupe à Cabana”… It’s a tradition, using a game of words to designate the name of the hair salon, sometimes… far-fetched!
A strong trend across France, but the North-East quarter is the one which contains the most brand names with a humorous tendency
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© Camille Privat – France Télévisions
In order to find out if the practice of puns for hair salons appeals to the public, the France 3 Bourgogne team handed the microphone to the people of Dijon in the street. A passerby admits: “I collect puns, I put them on my notes in my phone because it amused me.” But she deplores: “I find that to learn The spelling isn’t very good.”
A man finds the puns “rather cheesy. I don’t really like it. But hey, ‘hair salon’ is enough for me.” A young woman notes: “It’s funny, it’s better than something that doesn’t speak to us, that isn’t fun to read and that we don’t know what it is.”
It is true that these more or less happy puns often get people talking; there is a page on social networks that lists the names of the salons. A practice therefore widespread in France, and it is in the North-East quarter that we would find the most. Today, nearly one in five salons are named by a play on words (Le Monde newspaper survey – 2016)
There would be two strong trends for salon names, a trend with the word “tifs” (slang for hair) and another trend with “hair” (hair in English).
Chimène Villeminot opted for a name in “hair”she explains: “A ‘C’ like Chimène, hairstyle, advice, creation. C in hair, and then here’s the play on words with ‘hair’. It came naturally in fact, plus it’s a wink to the show that I really liked.”
So why do hairdressers use these figures of speech more than other business owners to name their businesses? For Chimène, “maybe we are more creative than the others…!”
Some people can’t decide, and skillfully use both tendencies. Example : “Faudra Tif Hair”. Its manager explains: “It was a play on words, a linguistic flaw when I was young. I said to myself, hey, that sounds good! It will be the name of my hairdressing salon. To make a little impression when people pass by in front of the living room, they say to each other, ‘Hey, this play on words is funny,’ and that’s it.”
To find out if the play on words is an obvious choice for the name of your salon, we went to ask the question in a hairdressing school, to meet the new generation. A student responds: “It will pass, it was fashionable at one time. Like all fashions, it ends after a while.”
Another student deplores the fact that “now, there are a lot of salons that will have the same name, in several regions. To find your salon, if you type it in and there are 15 that are called like that, I think it could be a little complicated for the customer I think it will eventually run out of steam.”
For the moment, the practice remains very widespread, our favorite in Dijon is the salon “Miss’t’hair” and the very exotic “Cabana Cup”.
► With Gabriel Talon
