If you’re travelling through France, you’ll find many a hair dresser (salon de coiffure) use the word ‘hair’ in their shop name. But not in the way you might think. The hair salons seem to feel some sort of obligation to make ‘hair’ word jokes in their name, using the fact that ‘hair’ is pronounced ‘air’ (the French not being able to breathe the letter ‘h’). Unfortunately, since they are not terribly good at puns, they also feel they need to explain the joke by adding an apostrophy right at the spot where the joke starts. To illustrate this, here are some pictures of hairpuns all over France:

Parten’hair stands for ‘partenaire’… your partner in hair. Here we have the famous apostrophy plus a a capital H, plus a rinse to make the word ‘Hair’ the colour of hair. Blonde, of course.

A ‘missionnaire’ is a missionary,
and this one is bringing people the only true braid.

We can see where they’re coming from, but we can’t really see where they’re going with this name. Is this a hair salon where you get zero leg room and they make you pay €5,- for a lukewarm drink?

‘Interplanetair’ makes the Ryan Air low budget barbers look like chums. This enterprise goes to galaxies no hair dresser has gone before. Which probably means they use big-ass telescopic mirrors to show you Uranus.

See what they did here? They spoiled a perfectly good  joke with the explanatory apostrophy! Because without the ‘h’, the ‘p’ is pronounced ‘p’. You try to breath a ph there, only to find there is no atmospair.
In the competition of lousy puns, these guys win the apos’trophy! <- with this one coming in a close second.

OK, they sell Brazilian extensions and they straighten kinky hair (défrisage). But did they really have to pervert the name of the famous Nike shoes? What’s next? Hair Jordan? If I were Max, I’d get mad!

OK, this one, I can live with. If only because there is no apostrophy. Let’s face it, they could also have gone for the chilling option antic’hair. Plus, this is really an antique shop (antiquaire in French) and they actually cut hair. Excellent combination, even though I probably would not go there for a modern hairdo.

Back to the farfetched ‘hair/air’ jokes. These guys are opened ‘NON STOP’… on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. They’re called ART’ HAIR with space and apostrophy… Pronounced ‘artère’. This means ‘artery’ and I feel like opening one right now. Just let me bleed out right here.  The world does not deserve me in it.

Fortunately it is not all bad. Because this is also a French barber shop, I guess mainly for men. With a name that did actually make me chuckle. A bit.

PS….

OMG!OMG!OMG!
I was curious and googled ‘antic hair’. Shouldn’t have.

Curiosity killed the cut.