Covid cutting creates a career

Avery Chick
NLJ Correspondent
 
Cutting class is about to take on a whole new meaning for Jacob Dunseth.
Jacob has moved around his entire life for various reasons, but ended up calling Newcastle home for the conclusion of his high school career and is a graduate of the Newcastle High School class of 2022.
During the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, Dunseth called Oregon home. There, according to Oregon.gov, schools were shut down and masks were more heavily mandated than here in Newcastle. Because of that, Dunseth had an abundance of free time on his hands. 
“I was just trying to find things that I could do to make some money,” he said. 
At first, he tried selling shoes, and although he wasn’t doing horribly with the financial aspect of that, he didn’t really love what he was doing. He was kind of at a standstill until he thought about something that he could do to help others – but it all started with him helping himself. 
“Every time I got a haircut, I didn’t really love the end result, so I started doing it myself,” Dunseth said. 
“I put mirrors up in my shop so that I could see myself better when I was cutting my own hair,” he said. 
Dunseth attempted to start his career by finding friends who would let him practice cutting their hair. 
“It took a lot of trust on their part because, at the start, I wasn’t very good or practiced,” he said. 
He moved to Wyoming when his parents found jobs here, and he started cutting hair in his new community. 
He has cut the hair of several residents, including Sam Cabello, Dayton McFarlin and Max Makousky. Dunseth said he has spent the past couple of years practicing so that he might eventually have a “leg-up” on other barbers if he did decide to go to school for barbering. 
That decision has been made, and in his next chapter of life, Dunseth said he plans to attend Rapid City Barber College in Rapid City, South Dakota. It’ll take about 10 months for him to finish school, and then he is required to be tested to earn his official barber’s license.
After school, Dunseth hopes to rent a chair in someone’s shop until he can get established enough to own his own shop. When you are just starting out in this profession, he explained, a lot of people don’t have the income to own their own business, so they rent space in someone else’s establishment. 
“I want to go into barbering because it can truly take you anywhere in life, and it allows for a lot of freedom, which is something that is important to me,” Dunseth said.
Dunseth said he wants to be a barber for the rest of his life, but he also wants to be able to do other things that he enjoys as well. That’s why barbering works out so well for him, because of the freedom it allows him. It also offers financial rewards to those who master the craft. 
“The more experienced you get and the better you become at cutting hair, the more you can start charging more, so it allows for advancement in that way as well.” Dunseth admitted that barbering can be quite an expensive occupation to start.
“The further into the job you get, the less expensive it becomes,” he said. 
Right now, Dunseth uses several instruments to cut people’s hair, and specializes in fades and tapers. That’s a haircut in which the hair on the sides is cut off or kept very short while hair on the top of the head is grown long. Dunseth primarily uses two pairs of clippers and two sets of trimmers, and prefers those four as his main tools. He has several other instruments, however, including other sets of clippers and trimmers, as well as straight edged blades and hair scissors.
“You want to have several sets of each instrument, as they get hot when you use them and you don’t want to make a customer uncomfortable,” Dunseth said. 
Dunseth said he is very excited for the future, and the anticipation is heightened by the fact that he has a family member who cuts hair. 
“My youngest uncle just graduated as well, and is also going to barber college, so that’s kind of cool,” he said.