💇 Hair Salon Games

Measured the same way as everything else here — opening each game in a real browser and counting the bytes that arrive — the median hair salon game downloads 10.9 MB. The catalogue median is 7.8 MB. The 3D shooters, with their maps and their weapon models, are lighter than this.

The reason is that a salon game has no reusable parts. A shooter builds one rifle and shows it a thousand times; a salon game has to ship every hairstyle it will ever offer, in every colour, in the order you might click them, and then a face underneath and a set of accessories on top. The choosing is the game, so the choices cannot be generated — they have to be drawn, one at a time, by a person, and then downloaded, one at a time, by you.

It is the clearest example in this catalogue of a genre whose file size is a direct measurement of how much work went into it.

What you actually do

Four verbs, in roughly this order: wash, cut, colour, style. Then a photograph.

The good ones make each step a small, specific interaction — the shampoo that has to cover the whole head, the scissors that only cut where you drag, the dye that bleeds if you leave it. The weak ones are a row of buttons where every button swaps one drawing for another. You can usually tell which you have within ten seconds, and both kinds are on this page, because the second kind is what most of the genre is.

A meaningful minority go further and become spa and salon management: a queue of customers, a clock, and the real mechanic underneath — deciding what order to do things in. That is the same engine that drives every restaurant game ever made, wearing a different apron.

There is no way to lose, and that is the design

Most games on this page have no failure state. Nobody grades the haircut. The customer is pleased whatever you do, the picture is taken, and the next customer arrives.

That places the genre next to colouring and dress-up rather than next to anything competitive, and it is why it works for a very wide age range at once. A game you cannot lose is a game you can put down at any moment, which is a rarer quality than it sounds and the main reason these pages get opened at eleven at night.

Before you hand over the tablet

Two things worth knowing. Forty-eight of the two hundred and ten are marked as working on touch, so check the card before you promise a phone will run it — and ten megabytes on a phone connection is a real wait.

And the advertising inside these frames is not ours and we cannot see it. The games are served from the studios that made them, which is true across this site but worth repeating on the page most likely to be opened by a nine-year-old. The collection for younger children is the one where a person opened every game first; the wider shelf is dress-up games and coloring games.