Zoom-ready: why remote workers still need regular haircuts

No commute doesn't mean no haircut — it just means the reason changed. Nobody's grooming for a subway platform anymore, but a laptop camera is a lot less forgiving than a quick glance in an elevator mirror. A video call sits a foot from your face, in flat light, for thirty minutes at a stretch. Grown-out sides and a shaggy neckline show up there in a way they never did on a crowded F train.

There's also a simpler reason this keeps mattering: working from a home office in Park Slope doesn't come with the built-in grooming reminders an office does — no coworker mentioning it, no bathroom mirror between meetings. It's easy to go six weeks without noticing, until a client call makes it obvious.

What actually reads badly on camera

Video compresses detail, so the things that show up are shape, not precision — an overgrown fade that's lost its line, hair pushed forward and flat from a headset, or a beard that's crossed from "trimmed" into "in progress." A clean, simple shape holds up on screen far better than an elaborate one that's two weeks past due.

Building it into a week with no commute

The upside of working from home is that a haircut doesn't have to compete with a fixed schedule. Benny's is a walk-in shop at 143 5th Ave — no need to save it for a Saturday when your Tuesday is wide open between calls. Weekday mornings, before the first meeting, tend to be the quietest time to walk in and be back at your desk inside 30 minutes.

A rough schedule to work from

Most people who work from home settle into a cut every 3–4 weeks — a bit more frequent than the old "once a month" office habit, since there's no commute-day haircut to anchor it to anymore. If your calendar has a recurring block of external calls, booking around that is an easy way to make sure you're never caught off guard on camera.