Charlie's compassion shows he is still a cut above rest

YOU go for a haircut, chat about summer holidays, what you're up to this weekend, then go home and spend the next two days wishing you hadn't let your crimper take quite so much off. Isn't that what hairdressing is all about?

But just as M&S food isn't any old food, neither, it seems, is a Charlie Miller chop any old close shave with the clippers.

He's one of Edinburgh's best known hairstylists and he is in full flow.

He's talking about empathy, about understanding his clients' every need, analysing them from the moment they sit down in the salon hot seat, unravelling their lives then crafting their style into the perfect coiffure to meet their needs, almost without them realising he's even done it.

It starts to sound as if a trip to the salon is on par with an angst-ridden session with a psychoanalyst, but then he talks about his latest clients and it makes sense.

They are about as far removed from the well-heeled uber-confident celebrity client as possible. Instead they are teenage girls, emotionally fragile at the best of times, worse now because their young bodies have been invaded by cancer, the hair they once obsessed over – tirelessly straightening and teasing into shape – now lies in clumps on their pillow or clogging up the plughole.

It's emotionally fraught, then, to simply show them a wig and tell them that's their hair for the next few months.

So it's lucky they have not only one of Scotland's original "celebrity" hairstylists, but also one so deeply in touch with his spiritual side, a "people" person who can swiftly read them, empathise with them and understand them.

"I get quite emotional with them," nods Charlie, the driving force behind a new nationwide scheme involving some of the country's best salons, who, thanks to him, have pledged to help cut and style wigs for teenage cancer patients up and down the land.

"What these girls go through, is overwhelming. There have been times I've found it hard to talk about them without getting emotional.

"I've had them fainting in the chair because these are very sick girls and styling a wig for them takes a long time.

"But once you have finished, and they look up and you see their eyes light up . . . that moment is so wonderful."

It's a much more intense response than the ones he must have seen from thousands of delighted clients down his 40-odd years clutching a pair of scissors. Few makeovers could match the mixed emotions of a teenage girl who walked into his salon bald from the ravages of chemotherapy, ready to walk out looking her best.

For Charlie, who spends his spare time reading thick, intimidating tomes on philosophy, that point is a moment of true divine fulfilment.

"I'm not a seeker, I'm a finder," he says more than once during the course of our meeting. "I call myself a spiritual nomad. What drives me? I suppose it comes down to just wanting to be a decent person."

So he spends hours with his young cancer patient clients. They are brought to him via the Teenage Cancer Trust – he tries to meet them long before they lose their hair so he can find out more about what they like, what they don't like and how they'd like to look.

When the time comes to style a non-descript yet high quality real hair wig into their crowning glory – in cutting terms, completely different to working with a real live head of hair – he has sussed their personalities, teased from them details of the impact of their treatment they might not have told anyone else, and, after a laborious styling session, given them back their looks.

It's a new phase in his career at a time when, nudging 65, he might have been thinking of winding up – indeed the girls who come to him for wigs and a handful of close friends are the only ones who still benefit from his styling techniques.

Although still heavily involved with the five salons across Edinburgh that bear his name, he put down his scissors a while ago to allow his son Jason and wife India full creative and artistic reign while his other son, Joshua, works as operations director.

Yet his 65th birthday later this summer, is not, he insists, a particular landmark age that will dramatically alter his workload or his lust for an industry which started with humble roots that hardly hinted at what would come.

He was raised in Arthur Street in the Pleasance in a room and kitchen that even now, he can vividly remember. "There was no electricity, just a gas cooker with a single ring, connected to the supply with a tube.

"There was a toilet – you had to walk out of your hallway, across the landing to the next hallway.

"But it was great, a fantastic childhood and never once was there thought of complaining."

His mother was a cleaner, his father a former navy stoker on a minesweeper during the Second World War who had diced with death but rarely spoke of it. Home from war, he continued the job, stoking the boiler at a laundry, a hot, dirty, hard task.

Perhaps not surprisingly, his son chose not to follow his route. Instead the young Charlie loved clothes and style – not particularly artistic at school but with a sharp eye for what looked right.

"I remember I had a job delivering groceries," he remembers. "I'd get my wages and go straight to the shops to buy new jeans."

He trained with a barber – Bob's at West Port – then branched out to launch His Hair in Prestonfield Avenue in 1965.

"Back then it was the first shop to have a fancy name, it was a time when men went to barbers and women went to salons – and this was the first of its kind that gave men a salon," he says.

He never set out to dominate the Edinburgh salon scene, but his reputation, trendy style and considerate ways lured clients through the doors. His knack of making them feel special – that natural empathy again – brought them back. "Everything in the business has grown organically," he says, "I'm organically ambitious, I like to do things as they happen."

While competition among city salons soared over the years, his brand name has remained stable. There have been opportunities to expand, an ill-fated attempt at launching a range of Charlie Miller products let down by technological hiccups and the proposal that he open a salon in Santa Monica which the close-knit Miller clan led by Charlie and wife Janet instantly threw out. "Edinburgh is our base," he shrugs, stroking his tiny goatee beard that was once jokingly pinched by the Dalai Lama – one of many influences on Charlie's thought processes.

"We like the quality of life here, we don't want to make ourselves ill travelling all over the place.

"We don't even want to go anywhere else in Scotland – you don't get Edinburgh hairdressers in Glasgow or Glasgow ones here.

"That's because Glasgow is influenced by the Irish, Edinburgh by the French – they are psychologically just very different."

Psychology, Buddhism, philosophy and spiritual fulfilment: Charlie Miller certainly seems a cut above your typical hairdresser . . .

ZOE'S LEGACY
CHARLIE MILLER works alongside the Teenage Cancer Trust, whose Hair 4U campaign helps provide real hair wigs for teenage girls who suffer hair loss as a result of chemotherapy.

It was partly inspired by the plight of Zoe King, from West Lothian, who lost her fight against cancer just days before her 18th birthday.

The Edinburgh branch of the charity has been boosted by full time voluntary fundraiser Lynne McNicoll, who last year helped spearhead a push to raise £250,000 for the cause through a variety of events.

The charity's funds are being used to provide a two-bed unit at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children to be specifically used for teenagers.

This year, Lynne is heading an effort to raise £500,000 to build a facility within the Western General Hospital for older teenagers.

For further information go to www.lynnesnewchallenge.co.uk or visit the Teenage Cancer Trust website at: www.teenagecancertrust.org.