🇮🇹 A Day With Paolo Barrasso: Talc, Steel and Old-World Wisdom
Some barbers you meet at events.
Others, you have to go and find.
Paolo Barrasso is one of the latter.
An Italian master barber, tucked away from the noise, who has been quietly doing things his way for longer than most of us have even been alive. The kind of man who doesn’t need to say he’s a master – his hands do it for him.
He loves German half-hollow straight razors.
Traditional Western steel. Nothing fancy, nothing “reinvented”. Just well-balanced blades with history in the spine and a certain weight in the hand. Watching him work is like watching someone tune an instrument: gentle, precise, but absolutely unforgiving.
Stepping into his world is like stepping into a different era of the craft.
The Paolo method has been running since the 1960s.
Talc powder everywhere – not as an afterthought, but as part of the choreography. He uses it in a clever, almost mechanical way: to map the skin, to control grip, to manage friction, to keep the shave clean and the lines visible. It looks extravagant if you’ve never seen it before, but every cloud of talc has a reason behind it. You can feel decades of repetition in that small, white storm.
And then there’s the strop paste.
He doesn’t over-explain it, doesn’t dress it up with theory. He learned it from his father and his uncle, two barbers who did things the old way: paste on the strop, razor on the leather, and off you go. When you ask him why he still uses it, he smiles and shrugs in that very Italian way:
“I don’t know. We always did it like this. It works.”
And that’s the point.
Not everything in our craft needs a scientific paper. Sometimes the proof is in the shave, in the feedback of the blade, in the skin that leaves the chair calm and smooth instead of angry and red.
We shared a meal together – the kind of simple, honest food that makes you slow down and listen. Between bites, the conversation went deep: the state of the industry, the flood of fast trends, the slow death of real technique, the future of barbering and what might still be saved.
Paolo speaks with the weight of generations.
You feel his father and uncle in his stories, in the way he talks about service, in how he sees the barber chair as something almost sacred – a place where men should feel safe, seen and taken seriously. He drops tips and tricks like it’s nothing: small adjustments in angle, pressure, lather, preparation. Every sentence feels like a shortcut past a few years of trial and error.
He’s not trying to be an influencer.
He’s just a beautiful human being with a ridiculous amount of wisdom, doing what he has always done: shaving, cutting, talking, listening, teaching without acting like a teacher.
The visit was inspiring in all the right ways.
Not flashy, not loud – just a quiet, powerful reminder of how deep this craft can go if you’re willing to look beyond the surface. The German half-hollows, the talc, the strop paste, the rhythm of his hands: all of it is fuel to dive even further into our own work at ROMAIN and within the Academy.
This is not the kind of encounter you forget.
It’s the kind that follows you back into your own shop, into your own chair, into the way you pick up a razor the next morning.
Thank you, Paolo Barrasso.
For the time, the stories, the food, the talc, the steel, and the reminder that real barbering is bigger than any one of us.
Want to join the Scapicchio Academy at ROMAIN in Ghent, belgium?
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If you want more than just a good story and you’re ready to sharpen your craft (or your own look), you know where to find us.
From straight razor training and honing on natural stone to classic shaves and serious beard work in the chair, ROMAIN Barbershop & Academy in Ghent is where it actually happens—no noise, no shortcuts.
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