Popular Westport Hair Salon shuts its doors after twenty three years

A hair salon is so much more than scissors, colouring brushes, curling irons or hairdryers.

A chair in a salon can be what you want it to be; a community, a counselling session with the added perk of a new hair do, the place you go to escape the outside world or the place where you go to look your best before a big occasion.

For twenty three years on the Fairgreen in Westport, Sharon Gill's Hair Salon was all of those things and more under one roof.

The distinctive blue and white sign that had been above the door for all those years came down on Wednesday last.

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Speaking to The Mayo News, Sharon is clear that “this is my decision. No more stress. The relief is just fabulous and now I can get better. I need to mind myself. It is stressful running a business, and so now just bring it on.”

She is looking forward to recovering and some well earned rest. For the last twenty three years, Sharon didn’t take holidays as she now jokes, she thought the place would fall down without her.

Health scare

She was doing the wages one Thursday evening when she found a dreaded lump on her breast.

“And it was like, oh my, I was just writing and it was like, Jesus, what's that!?”

Her GP immediately referred her to Dr Barry, “who is amazing” and within three weeks, on the May 11, she was diagnosed with stage three cancer.

Sharon was told that she needed to be in Galway the following Friday.

Her first reaction was that she said she couldn’t go, she was thinking of all the people booked into her salon: “I have communions and confirmations and people going to weddings.

“I had no choice and sometimes you just have to look at life and go, hang on a minute now, Sharon, you've got cancer. So what about the communions on Saturday? Do you want to live, or do you want to die? And like you see immortality just there. For everybody, when they're diagnosed, when you hear the word 'cancer' and you think of death. It's the first thing you think of and the first thing I said was, 'Oh my god, I'm gonna die'.”

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It speaks to the all-consuming nature of running your own business that even when Sharon ‘was full to the gills with chemo’ that her mind was still occupied with making sure her team and bills were paid, not to mention the colour that needed to be bought. Sharon will be finished with treatment at the end of next month.

“I'm going to take a couple of months off and just see what my beautiful life is going to bring me next. I'm going out with a bang. It's been amazing. And just see what the next chapter holds.”

Her advice for anyone going through treatment is to keep strong and get help.

What surprised her most was that she found this last phase the hardest.

“Nobody said to me that I was going to suffer on the last hurdle and I did very badly but thank God I got through that. You go into yourself 'I thought I was going mad', but it's not. They call it PTSD, and everybody suffers with it after getting cancer. But I just feel that there's not enough out there about it.”

Giving back

Sharon wants to give back and “would love to help people that have cancer, because I've been through it. I know what they're going through. Because thankfully, people that don't have cancer haven't a clue. They haven't a clue, and you don't expect them to. I never had a clue and I never thought this would come my way.’”

She did a course with the cancer support group in Rock Rose House Castlebar and met “ten fabulous girlfriends, all going through cancer” and they go for coffee together every week.

This advertising feature appeared in The Mayo News 23 years ago when Sharon Gill first opened her hair salon

Since putting an ad in The Mayo News and posting on social media that she was not going to be reopening her salon, Sharon has been overwhelmed by the huge number of well wishes she has received.

She stepped back from the salon in July last year and was amazed at the response she got after the salon posted on social media.

“The love has been phenomenal. I got over 300 mass cards, cards and well wishes in the post alone. I was just shocked. Oh my god, I was blown away.”

Some of her clients have been with Sharon for over thirty years.

She says hairdressing has been ‘so good to me’ and she has loved going “through all their life patches too.”

“The good old reliables, the every weekers to the six weekers are all fantastic. You have your clients that you would tell your life story to and you go through all their life patches too.”

She wants to thank all of her hundreds of clients over the years and in particular Sally and Suzanne, who have been her two rocks throughout. She describes Sally as an “absolute gem” and says Suzanne is “like my sister.”

Chris Harper took down the sign over the door that his father had put up twenty three years ago last week.

The salon has now been cleaned and emptied and all that remains to be done is hand the keys back to her ‘wonderful’ landlord Noreen Armstrong.