Moscow Barbering School (MBS)

Moscow Barbering School is the largest operation among the Russian entries here, teaching from Paveletskaya Embankment in Moscow with a second branch on Bolshoy Prospekt in St Petersburg. It is the barber academy of the TOPGUN barbershop chain, now trading under its own MBS brand, and states that it trains roughly a thousand students a year.

More than thirty courses run across six streams: foundation training, men’s cutting, fades, shaving and beard work, individual tuition, and travelling courses delivered on site. Named programmes include the beginner First Course in weekday, alternating-schedule and evening variants, a second-level upgrading course, Geometry of Form, Commercial Haircut, a speed course called Thirty Minutes, Crop and Fade, Zero Fade to Hero, and Classical Shaving. Dated intakes run frequently through the year. Students supply their own tools, and the school offers employment to its strongest graduates. Prices are not published and require a phone enquiry. On the credential: the school issues what it calls an MBS diploma and markets it as being found in every third barbershop in the country, but no education licence is published, so despite the word diploma this is an in-house document.

One point applies to every Russian provider in this directory. The meaningful distinction here is whether a school holds an obrazovatelnaya litsenziya, an education licence. A licensed school can issue a state-recognised udostoverenie o povyshenii kvalifikatsii or a diplom o professionalnoy perepodgotovke, while an unlicensed one can only issue its own certificate. Not one of the schools listed here publishes a licence number. Where you see the words “diplom” or “international certificate” used in their marketing, treat them as in-house documents, because that is what they are.