(Reached by phone, one of his former clients, who is currently at the Pennsylvania prison where Valle did time, said, “He can cut hair real good, yes indeed.Ask most men - whether they’re bearded or subtly stubbled - about what they use to shave, and they’ll likely all reply with some twist on the same basic tool: a cartridge razor with disposable blades, either from a drugstore brand like Gillette or Schick, or a newer, direct-to-consumer company like Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club. People loved that Valle did things differently. He noticed that some prison barbers were using nail clippers others used toothbrushes as combs. “I was eating every day like a king,” he said. By attaching a razor blade to a comb, he made his own razor-comb, and soon he was blending fades like a pro. One problem: scissors were hard to come by at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he landed before being sent to a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. After his drug arrest, in 2013, he began working as a jailhouse hair stylist. “My entire life, I was gonna be a barber,” Valle said. Valle had started out cutting the hair of local fishermen, in Puerto Rico, when he was nine by 2006, he was giving trims to Newark’s mayor Cory Booker. An incarcerated man replied, “This mothafucka turned this place into a spa!” One day, a guard asked what was going on. He offered facial treatments (toothpaste mixed with Noxzema and sliced cucumbers) to lifers in their cells. He crushed the graphite from pencils and mixed it with baby powder to make hair dye. “Thank God I didn’t have to use it.”īefore long, he started applying his ingenuity to matters of grooming. “Anything could happen at any time,” he explained. I wouldn’t have come up with the idea of the razor.” He elaborated: “The only thing you have to play with in there is the trash.” At first, Valle, who is tattooed from head to toe (“Dick, balls, ass-I’m tatted up!” he said), melted down plastic (toothbrushes, water-bottle caps) to make a knife. “One thousand one hundred seventy-three grams,” Valle interjected. he did a five-year stint in the federal penitentiary for cocaine-” Trichter looked at Valle and said, “You can step in if you want, but I’m gonna tell your story.” He went on, “So. It had a bendable blade, curved like a scythe. Valle held up a handmade straight razor whose handle was studded with plastic gems. “It’ll be the first line of my obituary,” he said. The purchase was more about fame than about fortune. So I probably overpaid.” He wore a made-to-measure suit over a monogrammed shirt. “It couldn’t be like a vulture came in and picked it up,” Trichter said. Morgan, bought the barbershop two years ago, after the Vezza family, its owner for about seventy-five years, announced during the pandemic that they were closing it. We’ll be the test kitchen,” Trichter said. It took seven years.” Joel Valle, the barber, had constructed his first prototype-“a bendable razor blade!”-in prison, for the cost of a can of soda. “When Gillette came out with the Mach 3, they put seven hundred fifty million into manufacturing and development. Electric, disposable, Harry’s, Schick, safety, straight: “It’s a three-billion-dollar industry!” Jonathan Trichter, the businessman, said. At Astor Place Hairstylists the other day, a businessman and a barber sat around talking razors.
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