beauty school scholarship app cheese thoughts things strings:
“It is not that I do not want to see a classically
beautiful man or woman. It is more that the classical
version of beauty benefits from our eyes being
opened to other options.”
Guido Palau
Before I enrolled in cosmetology school, I could count how many times I had been in a salon on one hand. Growing up, the beauty industry was a world entirely foreign to me. To my mother’s dismay, I spent my childhood chopping off my hair with craft scissors and talking my brothers into wearing lipstick, but when it came time to think about my future, the beauty industry was not where I saw myself. In fact, the beauty industry was the last place I saw myself. The fine arts, music, theater, film, journalism, or academia -- my ambitions were considerably scholastic and seemed to include everything else but cosmetology. My lack of attachment to my own hair freely allowed me to destroy it and destroy it often, but it never occurred to me to develop that creative impulse into a career.
I had recently completed graduate school. I was in career limbo, attempting to decide whether or not I wanted to continue carving a professional academic path or move on in a different direction. A friend on his own career path in academia asked me to cut his hair. I instantly refused. Years before that, a college roommate asked me to help her highlight her hair; I fried her hair, it fried our friendship, I learned my lesson. But my graduate school friend was persistent. I soon gave in, grabbed my clippers, and dragged myself to his apartment. I was terrified, but to my surprise, it went incredibly smooth. I did not hurt him at all, and our friendship was still intact! I had an epiphany. “Maybe I should cut hair,” I thought. A week later, I was in cosmetology school. It really was that fast.
Every minute of every lesson in cosmetology school gave me and continues to give me more reason to believe that the beauty industry is where I need to be. I knew that I wanted to develop a practical skill that would get me out from behind a desk but I had no idea how incredibly rich and diverse the opportunities would be. I wish to immerse myself into the fields of art and fashion, domains I find endlessly inspiring in addition to demanding a work life that is physically challenging and creatively rewarding. My primary motivation for pursuing a career in the beauty industry is to foster success in these domains. I find the work of hair stylists Vidal Sassoon, Julien D’ys, and Guido Palau extraordinarily inspiring not only because it is fascinatingly imaginative, but because as professionals, they never sell themselves short or cast their output as merely hair dressing, but they recognize their place in a much larger conversation about aesthetics and society. I want to be a part of that conversation. I want to contribute to a field that understands conventional standards of beauty but is also constantly experimenting and challenging those standards, only to strengthen that field and encourage progress. Beauty is not only skin-deep. Beauty is not about luxury or pampering, but about education. It is about teaching people how to see their own individual qualities and teaching them to define beauty for themselves. In this way, the beauty industry combines everything that I find enchanting and impassioned. It is the beauty industry that will allow me to build on my strengths and encourage me to produce a body of work that I can be proud of.
