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Date | Compiled by Elise Plunk | Photos by X
“When people talk about scissor sharpening, people think it’s not a big deal; it’s just grinding, and that’s it. But it takes at least five years of freehand style sharpening to be good. When you reach a certain point, you need that experience. It’s an art.
We started our business in 1998. [My husband] studied business in Japan, and the funny thing is he helped some Korean scissor factories to translate because Japan is famous for haircutting scissors. And you know, it led to more and more steps inside the scissor business, and then eventually to starting our own. I was expecting to be a kindergarten teacher or an ESL teacher; I got an ESL certificate before I got married. I was going to teach English to kids. But you know, life doesn’t turn out how you’d expect it, so we’ve ended up doing the business for almost 30 years now.
Each kind of our scissors is different. They are all manufactured in different factories and use different metals. Sometimes it’s really hard because low-end scissors are not meant to be sharpened. They are meant to be used once and then thrown away. My customers don’t know about this, and then they ask us to sharpen them expecting better quality. So we try to explain that, and depending on the condition he uses different machines and different metals to sharpen.
We try to educate a stylist on what they should check for before they spend lots of money, because it’s not a cheap tool. It’s their main tool, kind of an extension of their hand … Most hair stylists suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome because they use their wrists a lot, a lot of pressure through their thumb using the regular flat, regular style scissors, but this one helped them reduce the pain because it has less movement on them. So that’s why we call it a painkiller. To reduce the pain or prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
There are lots of conventions and a guild among the scissor sharpeners. You cannot believe how serious they are! It’s the same as cooking. All of the ingredients can be the same, you know, but not everyone can make a good dish. Sometimes they share their secrets, but not the real secrets.”
