Condoms as hair braids? A new car for $70?

Challenge to create beauty out of thin air
“Even when you have the money, some consumer items are just not here,” complained Marina Martin, a mechanical engineer who styles hair for a living and whose biggest clientele are women looking for hair extensions.

In the beauty shop she set up in her living room in colonial Old Havana, nothing here goes to waste.

Marina moves hair deftly from one head to another. A foot-long pony tail shorn to give Aleida a new look is later sold to Carmen as a hair piece for less than $20, or a tenth of its price anywhere in the United States.

Recycling hair takes hours and uses what Marina calls “a pure Cuban invention” — after the scissors and the shampoo she pulls each strand of recovered hair through a small wooden loom, more suitable for weaving a tapestry, before sewing them together.

However, this stylist has life easy when compared to how other Cuban beauticians make do.

In beauty parlors run by the state, hairdressers struggle with even fewer professional supplies.

Janis Lopez curls hair at a shop called “ Ilusiones,” where Saturday morning gossip is as popular as this season’s hair color. Janis seems to have three pairs of hands, jumping from customer to customer.

“My homemade products are just as good as anything in the dollar stores,” she brags, “and gentler on the hair.”

She sets one woman’s hair with homemade rollers made from empty cans and cardboard toilet paper rolls. Another woman is put under the dryer with two plastic cups covering her ears. Janis grabs a fistful of hair from a younger customer, rubs in a little bit of oil mixed with oregano, wraps it around a large soup can and then covers it with a thin plastic shopping bag. “This will take the frizz out.”

Janis graduated beauty school 15 years ago, a time when shampoo on the island was in short supply.

“That was a challenge — to make every woman beautiful, even when that meant making something out of thin air.”

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