Charlotte Mensah is the undisputed queen of black hairdressing, with clients including Zadie Smith and Michaela Coel. Here, she tells Funmi Fetto about ‘good hair’, pushing boundaries and the joy of her salon community
Would you like some cake?” I stare, slightly perplexed, at the sizeable sweet treat being presented to me at Hair Lounge. A few questions race through my head. To get through that mammoth piece, how long will I need to leave my mask off? At what point does that become illegal? After over-indulging pre, during and post lockdown, should I really be eating more cake? Overwhelmed by my thought process, I politely, reluctantly, declined. Being served homemade nutmeg cake at a hair salon might seem unusual but this is Charlotte Mensah’s salon. It has a reputation not simply as the place where storied clientele come to have their hair done, but as a place people come for community, conversation and, yes, cake. “I love to bake,” smiles the softly spoken Mensah on the afternoon we meet. “It’s something I got from my grandmother. She had a massive clay oven in her compound in Accra, in Ghana, where she would bake a lot of cakes and breads. She also knew how to do hair.”
To know Mensah is to know that the “doing hair” gene has most definitely been passed down. But to say Mensah does hair is akin to saying the pope does religion. In Afro hair circles, she is a legend. Her experience as a stylist spans three decades and countless awards, including winning British Afro Hairdresser of the Year three times. In 2017, she became the first black woman to be inducted into the British Hairdressing Hall of Fame.
