How Hairstyling can Affect Your Community

Photo credit: Flickr user Mike McSharry

Painters, poets, musicians, etc. all come to that point in which they have to ask if this thing they spend hours a day refining has any real value to other people. To many of the greatest, the answer is irrelevant. They're going to continue and paint Starry Night, or write The Raven, or compose their Requiem, because they have a disease. Artists can't stop practicing their art. So it's normal for an artist to fall into depression because they can't answer the question “what good will this really do?”

You style hair, so it should be a little easier to answer, right? You make people look good. You make them feel better about themselves. Your audience is constantly interacting with your art. But even these facts aren't always enough to pull a battered hair artist out of the pits, so, for your encouragement needs, here are a few real-life, tangible examples of the good hair styling can do for a community.

Styling the Homeless

Photo from Beauty in Transition website

Feeling good about yourself goes a lot farther than you think. Jody Wood has been taking her mobile salon, Beauty in Transition, to homeless shelters since 2006. Wood has witnessed a real change in the people she styles, who say they've been “reconnected with who they are and who they wanted to be.” Wood claims to have a heart for the often judged homeless community, and wants to “rethink those social structures surrounding tradition through art.” If you're keeping track, this is someone actively trying to change people’s perception for the better in several communities through hair styling.

Family Connections

There's more than one story about a single father styling his daughter's hair. And every time, the story not only revolves around a healthy relationship between a father and daughter, but the domino effect of other fathers following suit. Phillipe Morgese has gone so far as to start an official workshop, the Daddy Daughter Hair Factory, teaching other fathers how to style their daughter's hair. It's a way to not only improve the hairstyles of frustrated daughters everywhere, but to foster quality time with their struggling single parent.

Styling for Cancer

Photo from “Fringe: The Art of Hair” facebook page

Kim Barbagallo became a hair artist against her parent's wishes, going into debt to put herself through cosmetology college. She spent years working her way up to opening her own salon, Fringe: The Art of Hair. But she came to understand a true value in her craft when she started styling a friend's hair who was battling cancer. She said she “was able to learn what cancer patients go through mentally” with this experience and dedicated herself to making cancer patients beautiful. Now she's licensed in coloring and cutting wigs so she can keep spreading joy through hair.

Hair and Identity

It's important to remember, as you move through your journey as a hair artist, that people identify themselves through their hair. They see it in the morning, and that's their image of themselves for the day. Other people see it and comment on it. A hairstyle can change a face from soft to severe. It's a form of expression for both you and the client that is always talking. And if it says good things, it will cause good things to happen.