Hairdressers and salons expected to reopen in June -

Hairdressers, barbers and salons are expected reopen at the end of June, three weeks earlier than originally planned. But what will a trip to the salon look like when they reopen?

It looks like hairdressers could be reopening earlier than expected. Yesterday Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that plans for reopenings originally in stages four and five of the phased reopening, will be brought forward.

On Wednesday Varadkar said: “We brought some things into the phase that started this week including opening more shops that we had originally planned. We’re now working on revising phases four and five so that we can have the country almost fully opened by the middle of July instead of the middle of August.

“The kind of things we’re looking at, for example, is bringing forward the opening of the hairdressers and the salons and a couple of things like that and we’ll have that work done probably this week.”

This could mean that hairdressers, barbers and beauty salons are allowed to reopen on June 29, three weeks earlier than the originally stated July 20 date. According to the Irish Times: “Government sources on Wednesday night said that a decision to bring the reopening of barbers and hairdressers forward to June 29 is being worked towards”.

But a trip to the salon will look very different to how it was back in March, before the closures. So what can we expect when we are finally reunited with our much-loved hairdressers and nail techs?

The Irish Hairdresser’s Federation (IHF) has proposed 100 measures that it says would allow salons to reopen safely. Included in the measures are a ban on reading materials, like magazines, and stylists’ stations being sanitised after each customer. It proposed that stylists will wear PPE (personal protective equipment), social distancing measures will be in place and clients will be screened on the phone before visiting salons.

Similar measures will be in place in beauty salons, with clients and technicians/therapists wearing masks for treatments such as manicures and pedicures, operating a one-in-one out policy and only taking bookings in advance.