His cuts start at $150. That is what people pay for Mark Bustos’s work in the salon. But one day a week, the same hands, the same skill, and the same chair-side care cost exactly nothing — because on Sundays, this New York hairstylist walks the streets cutting hair for people who have nothing.
It started in May 2012, on a trip that reset what his day off was for. Bustos traveled to the Philippines, where he rented a barber’s chair to cut hair for poor children. Something about that work rearranged his priorities — and when he came home, his Sundays were never just his again.
Ever since, he has spent his one day off walking the streets, looking for the person who needs what he knows how to give.
One line, every time
Bustos approaches people with a single line: “I want to do something nice for you today.”
Eleven words. No pitch, no conditions, no lecture attached. Just an offer, made to someone who is not used to receiving offers with nothing behind them.
He cuts hair for up to about six people a day this way. And he does it in public — deliberately. That detail is part of the point, not an accident of working outdoors. He cuts hair in public spaces to make kindness visible: to let everyone walking past see care happening out in the open, where it might quietly reset what they think a stranger can be.
His rallying tag says the rest of it plainly: #BeAwesomeToSomebody.
Why a haircut is not a small thing
It would be easy to file this under “nice gesture” and move on. But think about what a haircut actually is for a person living without shelter. It is one of the ordinary dignities that disappears first — and one of the first things another human being notices, judges, and uses to decide how to treat you.
A fresh cut does not solve housing. Bustos’s story never claims it does. What it does is restore, for an hour and for the weeks the cut lasts, something specific: the feeling of being looked after, and of being seen as a person someone chose to do something nice for. Delivered by a professional whose paying clients start at $150, it also says: your head deserves the same craft as anyone’s. The price tag is not there to inflate the gesture — it is there to prove the quality is identical. The free cuts are not the leftovers of his talent. They are his talent, at full level, given away.
One day a week. Since May 2012. Up to six people a day, one introduction at a time: “I want to do something nice for you today.”
Imagine if everyone with a skill spent one day sharing it at full quality with people who could never pay for it. Electricians, seamstresses, dentists, teachers, barbers — the Sundays of the world would look very different.
Join the conversation
What is YOUR skill — the one people pay you for — and could you give it away, at full quality, one day a week? And be honest: when was the last time someone did something nice for you with no angle at all? Tell us below.
Source note: Mark Bustos’s free haircuts for homeless people since May 2012 — beginning with a trip to the Philippines where he rented a barber’s chair to cut hair for poor children — his Sunday street walks, his opening line “I want to do something nice for you today,” cutting hair in public for up to about six people a day to make kindness visible, his chair work at Three Squares Studio starting at $150 a cut, and his #BeAwesomeToSomebody tag are documented by HuffPost and NYT-covered profile reporting from 2014 onward and the subject’s own accounts.
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