Mira Chai Hyde has a client roster that reads like the ultimate who’s who. Guys in every industry—from film and television to art and fashion—have trusted their hairlines and faces to her well-trained hands. Her resume even has a section for “gangsters.”
Born in the Philippines to a North Korean mother and a Russian Polish father from Brooklyn, Hyde has spent the better part of the last four decades putting the practice of male grooming on the map. Today, she runs her own hair care and grooming line called House of Skuff and cuts hair out of the garage of her L.A. home, where we caught up with her to talk about everything from the most down to earth celebrities she’s worked with to the critical do’s and don’ts of men’s grooming, hygiene, and style.
Left: Hyde as a secretary in San Francisco; right: backstage at a fashion show in Milan as an established men’s groomer.
Mira Chai Hyde
Hyde moved from the Philippines to the U.S. on her own when she was just 14. “I called a friend of my father’s to get me out of the Philippines so I could go back to school because I had been on the streets, I’d been on drugs, and I was hanging out with not the best kind of people,” she says. In the U.S., she lived in foster care until she was 18, when she moved to San Francisco, taking a job as a secretary with her sister’s husband. She later moved to New Haven, Conn. with her then-boyfriend, who was studying at Yale.
Her knack for hairdressing revealed itself on a lark, though her creative sensibilities were clear from an early age. “As a child, I used to look at Vogue magazines, I was always very into fashion. I was always into art, making things out of junk,” she says. “Being a secretary was not my thing and I thought, ‘I will die of boredom.’” She started hanging out with a group of punks who let her experiment on their hair. A trip to London with an English band who had stayed with her and her boyfriend exposed her to the world of Vidal Sassoon and that sealed the deal. “I looked around and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
She called a friend of her father—a refugee from Czechoslovakia who lost everything in the Holocaust and then earned it back. She asked him to support her, and they made a deal: if in two years, she was still interested in hair, he’d help her. “Two years later, he sent me to Vidal Sassoon.”
Hyde with the late fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen; models backstage at one of his menswear shows.
Mira Chai Hyde
Hyde made her way through the house’s notoriously rigorous course, learning how to cut and color both men’s and women’s hair. But when she graduated, the business didn’t need any women’s hairstylists. “They told me, ‘If you want to join us, you have to be a barber,’ and I thought, sure I don’t care!” Within a few months on the floor, she was named barber of the year, and eventually worked her way up to the art director’s department. She realized she was more at home in the editorial world of fashion than in the salon, and after pounding the pavement and offering to do men’s grooming for free on fashion shoots, she left Sassoon to become a full-time men’s groomer.
“I had a relationship with a lot of the fashion agents, and the male model fashion agents would recommend me,” she says. “I taught myself how to do makeup on men—and I was all self-taught, I never assisted on anyone. I learned that hard work pays off.”
And that it did. Her first major photo shoot was with John Galliano; her first runway show was with the late Alexander McQueen, with whom she developed a close personal relationship after living in the same apartment building. “It was a wonderful time,” she says.
Then came a call from her sister. Hyde was needed in LA to help care for her mother, so she packed up her kit and said goodbye to her client list. “I had to start all over again,” she says. “In London I was doing all this great fashion stuff and then I came to L.A. and no one wanted to work with me, it was like a slap in the face. It didn’t matter my history—I couldn’t work with the actors, which is the main industry here.”
As she applied to different agencies, her first breakthrough came when Don Heanley’s daughter spotted Hyde on Instagram, which led to a four-year touring gig with the Eagles. Then through word of mouth, she started working on fashion shoots again, when she found herself on a Vanity Fair shoot grooming one model in particular: A then 15-year old Lucky Blue Smith. The stylist for the shoot, Jeanne Yang, was taken with Hyde’s work and referred her to her agency, the Wall Group, where Hyde signed and stayed for four years. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, Hyde’s instagram is a collage of every ‘It’ boy on the planet from Austin Butler to Pedro Pascal, who is a regular in her chair. “Mira is an expert and a friend,” Pascal tells Robb Report. “A guide in style, who understands what’s good for you more than you do yourself, and a guide in the heart. I go to Mira to look my best but also to be in her company. She’s the eyes everyone needs and she is family to me.”
Supermodel John Pearson, who’s the cofounder of the men’s lifestyle site Mr Feelgood, knows a thing or two about looking great, and he trusts his silky gray locks to none other than Hyde. “You know you’re in the company of someone special and someone who’s an artisan in their craft,” Pearson says of her work. “She gives you what you want and then you always get something else on top of it. She makes you feel confident—more equipped to take on the world and feel good about who you are.”
Another one of her clients, Joe Manganiello, says he doesn’t even give her directions. “I’m excited to let her do her thing, because, without being too cliche, she’s a sculptor,” he says. “She sees the coolest version of you and cuts your hair to match whatever signal she is receiving from her muse. What she does is transformational and it’s why everyone knows she is the best.”
Though she’s rightly regarded as a pioneer in the men’s grooming space, her strategy is remarkably straightforward. “I always keep an element of disheveled elegance,” she says. “I like them to look elegantly groomed but … it’s not perfect, and there’s a sexiness to that.” Men look best, she says, when they look like they just rolled out of bed – not too much fuss or pretense, but just enough of a cool factor to be alluring. Nevertheless, she recommends regular, rigorous hair washing. (“It’s bad for your scalp if you don’t and eventually your hair will fall out,” she says. “Usually a pore has about four hairs that come out of it, but if that pore is clogged from not washing it you might only get one – or eventually none.” ) She keeps her clients’ faces similarly simple, achieving a signature glow with some moisturizer, a few imperceptible cosmetic touches such as concealer and critically, sunscreen. (She recommends Allies of Skin to all her clients.)
Facial hair and beards—which she says should always follow the jawline—are the same as the hair on your scalp she says, and require the same level of maintenance. She recommends scrubbing the face twice daily to exfoliate, a necessity when you shave, which can help prevent ingrown hairs. “Anything with salicylic acid as well,” she adds.
Hyde’s hair care line, House of Skuff, was named for her dog.
Mira Chai Hyde
Not satisfied with the availability of great men’s products, she spent nearly two decades developing her own grooming like. “I spent a lot of time and money developing House of Skuff to make sure it’s safe for you and the environment—you could wash your hair in a stream and you wouldn’t pollute anything,” she says. Everything from the wearability (you can sleep in it and it’s pH balanced for your hair and skin, she says) to the fragrance was meticulously labored over. “You want to stay away from fake fragrance. It’s bad for you—and you don’t want to stick your head in your date’s face and have them go Ugh!”
Her other pet peeve? Errant nose and ear hairs. “I find it abhorrent,” she says. “You don’t need to go get waxed—just invest in a small clipper. And trim the stray hairs on your eyebrows!”
Ostensibly, what Mira does is cosmetic, but it’s clear in talking to her that it goes so much further than that. The relationship between a barber and their client is not unlike one between a therapist and a patient, or a priest and a parishioner. There’s an unspoken trust that is critical to getting the haircut just right, and to the experience in a hairdresser’s chair. And Hyde has earned the trust of some of the most extraordinary men in entertainment—Muhammad Ali, Hugh Grant, James Gandolfini.
“Mira is the queen of my hair and my heart,” says singer-songwriter Justin Tranter. “The confidence her haircuts give me is worth every penny and more. She is a true artist and I’m so lucky to be one of her canvases.”
As a hairdresser, she’s privy to a person’s true character, as if the barber’s cape lifts some kind of mask and she says it’s often the biggest stars who are the most down to earth. “I remember one time I was working with Gandolfini and I asked him if I could use the toilet in his trailer, because the one I was supposed to use was pretty far. And he said to me, ‘I don’t care if you fucking move in here!’”
Among the most down to earth people Hyde worked on was a distinctly otherworldly man: David Bowie. “I just was so blessed to have worked the whole day with him doing his record album and a movie that day,” she says. “And he was himself—the closest you could get to the real person. He was just himself, didn’t give a fuck. His manager was giving me a hard time and he just said, ‘Leave her alone, she knows what she’s doing.’”
This trust, she says, is earned by taking the time to understand a client—who he is, what he wants to look and feel like. “I love my work,” she says. “I love being able to make people feel really good about themselves. It’s such an important thing. It can change your whole feeling, your whole attitude. My clients walk out with a spring in their step.”
And certainly—that’s to the credit of Hyde’s skill, her technical training, her decades of experience honing her craft. But in speaking to Mira it’s apparent too that that spring in her clients step comes from something far more ephemeral, something that cannot be taught: her magnetic charm and infectious laugh—her straight forward, no nonsense way of talking about everything from the power of celebrity to the precision of a scissor cut. She has an immediately disarming sensibility; you really do feel like you could tell her anything. And it’s clear that she loves a good laugh.
“I worked with Tom Jones,” she says, breaking into laughter. “On the second day, I brought him my underwear to sign it and he couldn’t believe it! I said, ‘Don’t you get underwear thrown at you all the time?’ And he goes ‘But never to sign!’ And I still have them to this day.”
Years later, she ran into Jones’ son who immediately recalled the incident. “He said ‘Aren’t you that girl? With the underwear? We’ve joked about that for years!’”
Authors
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Caroline Reilly