French barber still trimming at 90 - 'My hands still don't shake'

At the tender age of 90, French barber Roger Amilhastre could have hung up his clippers decades ago but he said his passion for hair gives him a reason to get up in the morning.

"I love this job, it's in my bones," he said. "And despite my age, my hands still don't shake."

Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to customers' hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

"I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home," he added, which cost over $2,000 a month.

Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to help deal with his grief.  "I'm not grumpy getting up" to go to work, he said.

France's national hairdressers' union believes Amilhastre may be France's oldest active barber.

According to the national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.

In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds.

Many of Amilhastre's customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber's shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.

The shop has had its challenges. It witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II and suffered  a "tough period" after the war just when Amilhastre was starting to learn his trade. There was also a huge economic downturn in the 1980s, but the shop has survived. 

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That same decade, the AIDS epidemic sent customers into a worried frenzy.

"People were scared," he said. "They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there'd be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer."

Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs a nearby cafe and still remembers his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.

"He'd pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne," he said.

He is one of several old-timers to regularly drop by Achille's - even just to read the newspaper or have a chat. One other visitor, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut.

"With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship," he said.

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