Transient productions; enduring encounters: the crafting of bodies and friendships in the hair salon

This chapter explores the multiplicity of craft and making. It illustrates how the craft practice of service work can create enduring and lasting relationships with clients. Using the example of the hairdresser, I illuminate how through repetitive interactive encounters between service workers and customers, relationships and even friendships can be produced, bound together by the temporality and materiality of the products crafted. I contend that whilst the products of service work may be transient, unstable and fleeting, the skills of the service workers and the relationships they craft with their clients are not.