After Anna's experience, diagnosis of Breast Cancer and her experiences around hair loss and accessing barbers, we began to discuss interviewing high level cancer care providers in order to create webinar training packages for barbershops. We want to build a website to deliver these training tools and build a search engine where barbers who have completed our online course can become registered Safe Shavers, enabling those seeking this service to easily locate a local barbers in the knowledge they would be in safe hands.

Anna's story.

I was diagnosed with Grade 3 stage 3 breast cancer in 2018. At 35 and with a 3-year-old in tow it was a shock to say the least. The onslaught began - hospital appointments, chemotherapy, surgery before Christmas and radiation therapy at the begin of this year. The physical and mental trauma of diagnosis and treatment I have received has affected all areas of my life.

Safe shave was born out of the choice I made to shave my hair before I lost it. I wanted to take back what power I could.

I didn’t really want my husband to shave my head and he later told me, although he did bravely offer at the time, he was relieved he did not have to shave my hair that first time. However, my experience of going to the barber (while clearly in shock and newly diagnosed) left me feeling vulnerable and helpless. I was turned away from a number of barbershops, being simply told ‘We don’t cut women’s hair’. I did not want to go into a salon full of ladies getting cut, coloured or styled as this idea reinforced my insecurities and feelings of vulnerability around my identity, feminity and beauty. Feeling this defenceless, sometimes just the wrong kind of look or reception could be enough to unsettle me. I returned home very distressed without having my head shaved and feeling disempowered, lonely and frightened. There were a lot of tears. With the support of my husband, I telephoned a salon and arrange a cut, it was not the empowering experience I had hoped for.

I had decided at the point of diagnosis, to accept my hair loss as part of my journey and I wanted to take control of one small thing in a world that had become so mapped out for me and beyond my control in so many ways. I also decided that once my hair began to re-grow, I would rock a short hair style and to make a mini documentary film series about the process. Safe Shave began.