Three climates have shaped Mr Hassan El Gamal’s craft. Cairo, where he began. Dubai, where he refined. Singapore, where he now keeps the standard.
This piece is for the gentleman who has wondered how a barber trained in Egypt ended up cutting hair for a princely clientele and now performs heritage British grooming a hundred metres from Maxwell MRT.
Mr Hassan El Gamal began his journey in male grooming in 1999, training under the Egyptian Barbers Academy.
Cairo’s barbering tradition is one of the oldest in the modern world. The straight razor is treated as a precision tool. The towel rituals are layered. The hair, in Egypt, behaves differently, thicker on average, drier on the ends, demanding a particular discipline of scissor work that does not exist everywhere.
By the early 2000s, Hassan had earned his Master Barber distinction (2004) and his guild accreditation in the Egyptian Barbers Academy.
In Dubai, Hassan served as the private barber to His Highness Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, son of the King of Bahrain. He also worked with ministers, ambassadors, and chief executives whose names remain private out of respect and discretion.
Dubai brought two things into the craft. The first was the discipline of working with men whose appearance carried public weight, heads of state, diplomats, and the senior figures whose photographs appeared in news media. The standard could not slip. The second was a different climate, heat, low humidity, a hair behaviour distinct from Cairo’s.
The method developed: the same fundamental craft, calibrated to a different head of hair, in a different room.