On a gray Saturday afternoon, Yehia Hair Designs on 53rd Street was steaming. The smell of freshly pressed hair wafted through the humid mist of hair spray. Yehia, the tall, soft-spoken owner with gray-flecked black hair, gently turned his client’s straightened hair into feathered waves. About 20 women, most of them black, flipped through magazines and chatted about fighting winter blues as they waited their turn.
“I’ve tried other hairstylists throughout the course of the year, and my family always says, `You better go back to Yehia,'” Karen Beal said. She has been driving 45 minutes from Flossmoor each week for a curl and blow dry since 1986. Her 22-year-old daughter often joins her, and sometimes they also get their nails done at the manicure table in the back.
Yehia, who uses only one name, didn’t realize he was starting a trend when he began styling hair in Hyde Park after he moved from Egypt. A nearby salon that has since closed was “the only place that hired me, because I didn’t speak any English,” Yehia said, chuckling.
Today, almost 30 years later, he owns four Yehia salons citywide, and other Egyptian hairstylists have since set up shop nearby. As a result, Hyde Park’s premier salons for black women are owned and operated by Egyptians. Four–two Yehia salons, Ossama’s and Cleopatra Hair Design–sit within a five-minute walk of one another.
The Egypt-hair connection is not limited to Hyde Park. Hairstylists are highly respected in Egypt, where royal stylists were once buried with kings. The diversity of Egypt’s population, which includes Arabs, Africans and Caucasians, also prepares stylists for Hyde Park.
“You have to be able to do diverse hair when you work in an area like this: African-American, Caucasian, Asian,” said Floyd Jackson, who has worked for Yehia since 1984. “White and black people want hair shaven like Michael Jordan, and some white people want twists.” Most of Yehia’s clientele, though, is black.
“We have very curly hair, so it’s easy for us to work with African-American hair because that’s what we know best,” said Inas Estafanous, manager of Ossama’s, at Cornell Avenue and 51st Street, as about 10 clients, many of them teenagers, flipped through Seventeen, Ebony and Honey magazines as they waited. Estafanous said all her clients are African-American.
African-Americans, she said, are drawn to the natural technique of Egyptian stylists, who often straighten hair without using relaxer.
“In Egypt, we don’t like chemicals. We use more natural methods, so hair is healthier,” said Estafanous, whose father, Boulos, who had owned a salon in Cairo and now has three in Chicago, including Ossama’s. The Estafanouses moved to Hyde Park because “Egyptians come to where Egyptians are,” and Yehia was already established.
Finding a niche
At Cleopatra Hair Design on 53rd Street near Kimbark Avenue, a small television in the back intones international news and a sign about an anti-war meeting is posted in the front window. Owner Sammy Salem, accepting a $5 bill from a satisfied customer on her way out, tells a visitor that he moved to Hyde Park because “in Egypt, there are salons on every corner. Business was very slow, and there are higher taxes.” When he was working in Sudan after leaving Alexandria, clients from the U.S. Embassy recommended Chicago as a clean, safe place with a strong market for hair salons.
Like Yehia, many new immigrants who styled hair could not find work in the mainstream, white-owned hair market when they first arrived in the United States 20 years ago.
Leslie Honore, a Chicago-based advertising and marketing consultant with more than 20 years’ experience in the ethnic hair-care industry, said Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants faced similar situations.
“There was a wave of chemists who were Muslim who immigrated to the U.S. in the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s who couldn’t get jobs in white-owned laboratories. So many of these scientists found jobs with black hair-care manufacturers who needed chemists.”
One of her clients, Ali Syed, a native of Pakistan, jump-started his career at the former Johnson Products Co. partly because “other doors were shut to him, as they were to any minority,” Honore said. Syed went on to found Avlon Industries, a multimillion-dollar hair-care company based in Bedford Park. (See accompanying story.)
Now, with the black hair market worth $200 million a year, according to the Hunter-Miller Group, a black-owned market research firm based in Hyde Park, chemists and stylists with expertise in that area are flourishing. The owners of Yehia, Ossama’s and Cleopatra agree that there is plenty of business to go around. Said Salem, “People from south Chicago and the suburbs hear about us, so they come.”
Wendy Linares, receptionist at Yehia, said Yehia has loyal clients from as far as Minnesota and Georgia. “His clients follow him wherever he is,” she said.
Over at Ossama’s, as TLC plays softly in the background, Anis Bejaour, a 28-year-old Tunisian, chats with Estafanous in Arabic as Bejaour carefully tweezes the eyebrows of a client after blow-drying her hair. Bejaour said he learned how to style hair in his homeland, but “the styles are not the same. . . . They don’t curl” hair in Tunisia, he said.
At Ossama’s, however, curling is the specialty. Estafanous said her special technique of blow-drying and curling hair without using any spray or heat provides volume without the help of relaxer.
A market for immigrants
Honore points out that immigrants often dominate local salon markets. “I don’t know of anywhere else in the U.S. that there is this kind of accumulation of Egyptian hairstylists,” she said. “Cuban hairstylists are dominant in Miami. In New York City, first-generation Europeans from Paris and London emerge as the major players. … Each region in the U.S. has its own little quirkiness.”
In addition, she said, outside Hyde Park, most Chicago-area salons for black women are black-owned. “It would upset the black community and be inaccurate to say Yehia and other Egyptian hairstylists have a lock on the local black salon market. But Yehia does have some of the hottest salons in Hyde Park and in other parts of the Chicago area.”
Although some clients initially are drawn to the Egyptian salons because the stylists are from Africa, many say they don’t necessarily feel a special cultural bond. When Pepper Miller, president of the Hunter-Miller Group, went to Cleopatra’s to get her hair done 12 years ago, “I said, `We’re all brothers and sisters,’ and [the Egyptian stylists] seemed a little hesitant to embrace that. I was a little disappointed that we weren’t embraced as brothers and sisters the way we were in Africa.” (Salem of Cleopatra said he feels special connections to all kinds of people. “China, India, Sri Lanka–there are a lot of different people” in Egypt, he said.)
Still, as long as the stylists create beautiful hair, clients keep coming back.
Rosie Coleman of Hyde Park, who was at Yehia’s for a wash and blow dry, said she comes every Saturday because “I get a good cut every time. My co-workers said they liked my hair, and now my friends come too.”
Market grows at a fast clip
The Egyptian-owned salons in Hyde Park are thriving, partly because their primary clients, black women, have strong–and growing–market power. The Hunter-Miller Group, a market research group that focuses on the black community, recently published the following figures:
– 28 percent of black women like to change aspects of their style, such as clothing or hairstyle, on a regular basis, compared with 8 percent of white women.
– Black women have experienced a 38.2 percent increase in their median annual income since 1990.
– African-American women are highly attuned to fashion. Compared with white women, they believe it’s important to look their best at all times (65 percent vs. 32 percent) and to have their own individual style (69 percent vs. 54 percent).
— K.P.
