DOOM-SCROLLING THROUGH TIKTOK nonsense is how all of us found VicBlends.
In most of his clips, Victor Fontanez, 25, is outside somewhere, walking up to strangers. “I’m a barber and I give out free haircuts. I would love to bless you.” There’s an affectation to his voice that says hip-hop rap battles. During haircuts, he spits bits of sage wisdom (“Bro, sometimes your biggest blessings don’t come until the people that need to be out of the picture are gone.”) while running a cordless razor through someone’s unkempt mess. It’s calming, in an ASMR way, uncomplicated, and something vast swaths of the Internet is not: unapologetically hopeful.
As of a few months ago, some VicBlends videos have looked a little different—slicker and more polished—thanks to a certain legendary NFL quarterback. They feature an actual barber’s chair, multiple camera angles, and film crew. The first of those videos begins with B-roll and a scripted voiceover to intro his guest: “There’s only one GOAT. My name is VicBlends, and this is DeepCut with Tom Brady,” he says, dropping the name of the show made with the help of Shadow Lion, Brady’s content studio.
Brady and Fontanez bro-hug and No. 12 says, “I’m feeling like I need a cut, man.” Fontanez goes to work, asking questions like: “What is it now that you’re excited to learn?” Brady talks about new business ventures, becoming a broadcaster next NFL season, his investments into teams in boat racing, soccer, women’s basketball, and pickleball. Brady says he hopes his hard work can inspire others: “Whatever people do in life, how do they approach it and maximize it?”
Fontanez (right) about to take the clippers to Brady (left), in the first episode of DeepCut.
Post-cut, Fontanez and Brady hug it out.
At the 56-minute mark, the video breaks to commercial. VicBlends pitches dog food. VicBlends feeds branded snacks to his rescued pit-boxer mix. Which, if you’ve been following VicBlends since covid, the ad can feel like a record-scratch. But can you blame him for cashing in? He’s maximizing life.
Still, I carried the question about whether VicBlends had sold out with me when Fontanez invited me out for a haircut of my own. How much of this high-schooler-turned-mega-social-star was real and how much is the sneaky TikTok branding that has come to dominate the platform?
When he opened his front door for me in suburban Atlanta on a Wednesday morning, Fontanez wore a matching sweats outfit, green hoodie and pants from his clothing line. “Planted,” they said, matching the tat near his right eye.
He handed me a water and then offered one to a friend I brought along, who declined. “You sure? You gotta stay hydrated. It’s real important,” Fontanez said. He was so earnest. It seemed like he truly cared about our hydration level. VicBlends-level advice about our water intake.
We followed him up a steep staircase to a second-floor loft space. A million-dollar craftsman style two-story in a nice neighborhood, his house is full of tasteful art, chic chairs, the rescued mutt on his heels as always. After he offered me a haircut, I saw the chance to turn the questions around on him and see if VicBlends runs deeper than a news feed identity.
Fontanez started with a No. 2 guard on the sides as I asked him how he got here, to Internet fame, more than 3.5 million followers on Instagram and 15 million on TikTok, where he’s surpassed 243 million likes. “Lately I’ve been falling in love with people’s stories,” he says. But it’s not like that’s new, really. “I had the gift of gab early. I didn’t have to convince anyone of what I was talking about,” he says.
The barbershop has long been somewhere guys go to talk. Combine that venue with the proven post-late-night-show format of bite-sized interviews (Hot Ones, Chicken Shop Date) and boom. But you can’t also discount the fact that VicBlends has a well-developed sense of the human condition.
Fontanez sports a shirt from his The Planted Collective clothing line.
In high school, Fontanez devoured self-help tapes. He’d pick up snippets and slogans that he’d try to repeat back to friends. He cribbed a Rockefeller quote in senior yearbooks: “Give up what’s good for what’s great.” The kids laughed at him back then, when he tried to drop his knowledge, but he recognizes now there was no sincerity, just lines he memorized. His sincerity emerged in other realms of his life.
During my haircut, Fontanez recalled gassing out early in a cross-country race, and afterward he couldn’t stop the tears. “My dad was like, ‘Why are you crying in front of everybody?’ But I’ve always been so emotionally invested in anything that I did.”
And after his failures, Fontanez would go to the barbershop: Barber Kings, a Fayetteville place Sundiata “Sean” Morris and a friend opened in 2007. Most kids have a bad day at school and they’re moody, brooding, quiet. But Fontanez would come in and talk about that lost race, the embarrassment of the defeat. The shame of Dad watching him cry.
A generation older than Fontanez, Morris told me by phone that he felt in awe of this kid so in touch with himself. “I was like, ‘Man, you’re a real fighter. I can only appreciate that you’re so open with me,’” he says. “That gave him the energy and character that he is now.”
Sitting in a folding chair in his loft, I tilted back as Fontanez started working on my beard. He talked about all the ways he failed early. He was sure he’d be a pro skateboarder, a division one runner, a pro athlete in all the sports. His parents pictured college for him, but Fontanez wanted to follow Morris, his mentor. Fontanez says he started cutting hair in his parents’ garage, waiting tables on the side.
One night in 2017 while working at Rudinos, a sports bar that bakes grinders in the pizza oven, a guy busted through the front door and rushed straight to the bathroom. Nobody else in the place recognized him: Dennis Smith Jr., the kid from Fayetteville just drafted by the Dallas Mavericks. Fontanez stood outside the can, repeating to himself, “There’s an NBA player in the bathroom!” Fontanez stopped him on the way out and said, “I’d love to give you a haircut.”
“The kind of people he sought out, he realizes now, were ‘THE LONE TRAVELERS.’ Somebody who looks lost, in need of a transformation.”
Imagine for a moment you’re an NBA rookie who needs to piss so bad you rush into a sports bar. You come out of the bathroom and there’s this kid who won’t let you leave. Smith, the former NC State star, a point guard who’d soon score 16 points in his first NBA game, stopped to listen. Fontanez had one last business card in his wallet and handed it to Smith. And later Smith texted him.
Everything changed when Fontanez cut Smith’s hair. Soon Fontanez was the barber for baseball and NBA players, rappers and hip-hop stars. He moved to Atlanta. It was 2019, and VicBlends became barber to the rich and famous.
The pandemic ruined it. Social distancing forced us to do our own buzzcuts. Fontanez tells me he can’t remember where he got the idea originally, but one day when the lockdown lifted, he went to a park, and offered people free cuts while a friend from high school videotaped it.
The kind of people he sought out, he realizes now, were “the lone travelers.” Somebody who looks lost, in need of a transformation. Kids are good too, since the younger generation seems to have learned from ours, Fontanez says, “There’s more acceptance of mental health diagnosis and just personalities that people have, whether it’s your, you know, your sex, your gender, whatever it is that you love. There’s just so much more openness in the world to these things.”
VicBlends videos dropped back when we all needed good news: John Krasinski’s reports of pandemic heroes, Ted Lasso’s positivity, and VicBlends’ advice while cutting the matted and unkempt and desperate. At a time when we were all lone travelers, VicBlends wanted our advice and offered his own.
There’s the social worker, who Fontanez asked about mental health. “You know what? Everybody is made differently. Sometimes they’re just tired and they don’t know how to reach out.” The advice Fontanez gave a kid from Venice Beach is the one that stuck with me, telling Fontanez he wasted his last three years after not going to college. “Man, I don’t think there’s no such thing as wasted time,” Fontanez replied. “You paid for a lesson, and that lesson hurt more than others. But at least you know now what you have to do to make sure you never have that feeling again.”
Snapshots from the Fontanez x Brady episode of DeepCut, some of which feature Fontanez’s father.
There’s this wise little kid, Omar, explaining that you shouldn’t have trust issues if somebody doesn’t text you back. Also, Omar wants to make sure every kid in the world doesn’t go hungry. As his fade comes together, Omar says: “You gotta pass it down. If someone helps you, you’ve got to help someone.”
For my cut, Fontanez moved on to the spray bottle and scissors to tackle the top of my head. I watched gray-tinged hair shower his rug. I asked him about when he blew up.
Fontanez says it wasn’t overnight exactly, but there were times when he’d get tens of thousands of new followers, then hundreds of thousands, a million in a week. “I couldn’t really comprehend it,” he says. He tried, and he says he still tries not to bother with it, not to define success by views. “It doesn’t matter.” He pauses a while after saying that. “You know, life is bigger outside of social media. So like, who am I to treat somebody different because of what I have online?”
Big things are happening for VicBlends now. He has that clothing line, Planted, with plans to expand into home goods. He has a barber school, VicBlends Academy. There’s a book in the works.
And he launched DeepCut, that longform vlog of celebrity interviews. Tony Hawk and Lil Yachty sat in his chair for the series. During that first episode with Brady, Vic surprised his dad, Mel, a lifelong Patriots fan, by introducing him to his hero. “I almost pooped my pants when I saw him,” Mel told me. “He’s a very good guy. He’s taller than I thought he was.”
“Every little SUCCESS FELT LIKE HIS VEINS RAN WITH CAFFEINE. He couldn’t sleep, and he went three days without closing his eyes. He was too busy to eat and skipped workouts.”
Mel says he sees his son as pure, some kind of Buddhist monk of barbering. “I’m super proud of him. He’s a good young man with a good heart, and he’s showing it in his way.”
He explains that his son was an army brat, oldest of four. Born in Germany, Fontanez was raised there for a time, then Texas, and finally Fayetteville, N.C. He was a small kid, picked on and bullied sometimes. He had a sensitive way about him and devoured lessons and advice. His father remembers his so trying to repeat Sunday sermons to friends, as if one kid could lecture another on redemption.
This all sounds meteoric, a Hollywood origin story that came from humble beginnings. But about the time he bought the house in October 2023, Fontanez says he felt something change. Every little success felt like his veins ran with caffeine. He couldn’t sleep, and he went three days without closing his eyes. He was too busy to eat and skipped workouts. Nonstop euphoria, without a second of downtime.
“Your mind is running almost a thousand miles an hour. You kind of feel like you got everything in the world figured out,” he says. “I cracked the DaVinci code on every secret to the world.”
Then it crashed, a crushing darkness, a feeling of sadness that literally hurt. A friend finally recognized what Fontanez had and told him to go see somebody. For 24 years Fontanez had been this positive force that could turn every setback, every tear from failed whatevers, into motivation. But the psychiatrist he saw gave him the diagnosis: bipolar disorder. For the rest of his life, he’d need to take meds and beware of manic swings.
Fontanez repeatedly went over the same spots on my sides and beard and the back of my neck, the work of a perfectionist. He talked about accepting an incurable mental illness. It’s normal, I tried to reassure him. “I mean it doesn’t feel normal. Definitely doesn’t feel normal. And that is a hard thing to accept that, okay, for the rest of my life, this is gonna change things.”
Fontanez flanked by his dad, Mel, (left) and his brother, Alexander Sokirkin, (right).
It’s something now that he channels, connecting him better with the people in his chair. He devours their advice, internalizes it, makes it his. “Someone told me that God hides the best resources in the world. So diamonds and gold are found when you dig for them. They don’t just lay on the surface.”
Before he finished, before the wax to tame my colic, I asked Fontanez about the origin of Planted, his brand, but also his face tat. He talked of a tree, and I picture the big oaks outside draped with Spanish moss. He spoke of leaves changing color in fall. The same tree goes bare in winter. Then it’s green and lush in summer, those same branches once bare and now blooming with flowers, perfumed, and beautiful.
“And you think about a person. We’ll all go through different seasons of life. But the tree will never go anywhere as long as it stays planted. And unless you remove your roots, you’ll stand tall through whatever it is. Through all four seasons. So I believe being planted is just being grounded in who you are, what you believe.”
Heading out his front door with the best haircut of my life, beard so perfect and straight my wife would immediately run her hands over it, I believed him and in the philosophy of being planted. A convert to the wisdom of VicBlends, the barber preacher of TikTok.
