Rodrick Samuels on The Silent Work, Modern Beauty Education and Why Empathy Wins
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by Anne Moratto
Hairstylist Helps Client with Depression
Fixing hopeless hair for a depressed client lifts a hairdresser's spirit.
March 29, 2017
2 min to read
A recent Facebook post caught our attention as well as the attention of The Today Show, Fox and other news outlets. Ulta Beauty stylist Kate Langman told her story of a woman who came into the store looking for products to fix her extremely matted hair that she had neither washed nor brushed for six months while she was in bed with depression.
“She kept pulling it back into this bun, which had turned into a huge dreadlock,” Langman said. “The bun was so matted that it felt like she literally had a rock on the back of her head.”
The woman agreed to make a hair appointment instead of just taking home a lot of products, but she didn’t show up for that appointment or for a subsequent one she made. Finally one day she walked in and asked Langman if she could take her.
“Of course, I said yes,” Langman wrote on her Facebook page. “I didn’t care how late I stayed; I wanted to make sure she got taken care of.”
Trying to honor the woman’s request to keep the hair long, Langman resisted the easy route of cutting it all off. It took more than 8 hours to fix, and more than half of that was just trying to get the comb through. She colored the hair, improved the cut and styled it, the whole time telling herself to just keep going, that it would be worth it.
“By the end of this service, I could see the sparkle in her eyes and her cheeks getting rosy pink from the excitement of not only being able to run her fingers through her hair again, but because she felt like herself again,” Langman said. “I changed someone’s life today, and I’ll never ever forget it....I’m so thankful and so grateful I got to help with her first step. So in conclusion, I LOVE MY DAMN CAREER.”
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