How I Got Started in My Career
I’ve loved beauty, art, hair, and fashion since as early as I can remember.
My childhood babysitter still tells me stories about how I’d pick out my outfits and draw fashion looks in my coloring books.
“I always wanted everything around me to be beautiful and when I was super young I would be upset if we drove through a bare road wondering why no one would plant flowers there. My parents started asking for design advice from a young age and I always was encouraged to explore art in every medium.”
I loved hair and would chase my younger sister around the house, begging her to let me braid her hair. I was obsessed with doing braids and used to spend hours doing different looks on myself before school, determined to win best hair in the yearbook (didn’t win lol). We grew up near the beach, so I started braiding people’s hair on the beach for a small fee. Growing up as an athlete, I was the girl who braided everyone’s hair before practice and on the bus to sport competitions. My sister was a competitive cheerleader and I would wake up early with her before competitions and meet up with all the cheer moms to curl her hair.
When I got to high school my friends and I started experimenting with cutting and coloring each other’s hair. We always took risks and I had hair every color of the rainbow. By the time we got close to graduating high school I was unsure of what direction to go in my life. I thought about going to fashion school, doing food styling, photography, costume, and set design. Becoming a hairstylist never really crossed my mind because I was never interested in working in a salon as a career path and I didn’t know there was anything else I could do with it. I struggled through my teen years and ended up sleeping through my last chance to take the SAT’s.
“I was bullied in high school which led me to finish a year early. I started working at a salon as a receptionist while taking classes at the local community college.”
I loved attending the salon’s weekly stylist classes and learned about the opportunities involved in the beauty industry like doing hair for red carpets, fashion week, editorials in magazines, etc. I don’t know why I never realized it was someone’s job to do the hair for these things, but I was so inspired I decided to go to cosmetology school while working in the salon in the evenings and weekends as an assistant.
I ended up working in that salon for 8 years, taking advanced classes every 6 months until I had reached my potential there. I had built a great career there, but knew I had to move on to keep growing and to pursue my passions of editorial and red carpet styling. I saved magazine cutouts of stylist profiles and kept note of the credits in magazines so I knew who was doing all the celeb’s hair.
I moved to LA and started reaching out to stylists I admired who were doing what I wanted to be doing. I ended up assisting amazing people like Kristin Ess and Andy LeCompte, but the job that really stuck and changed my life was working for Jen Atkin. I was one of her two employees at the time when she was just starting Mane Addicts and OUAI, so in addition to being her assistant on the job, I was her personal assistant, was writing, shooting, and producing content for Mane Addicts, while helping her test and get samples for her product line. In addition to that, I was taking my own clients with any time I had off to make money to survive.
I worked for Jen and ran Mane Addicts for 2 years before my own career started taking off and I was busy enough to go off on my own. I built my clientele through word of mouth, referrals, and building relationships in the industry. It was actually Jen Atkin who referred me to Tresemme to be their Global Ambassador, which has opened up amazing bucket list opportunities in my career, like leading shows backstage at NYFW and being the lead hairstylist on Bravo’s Project Runway for the past 2 seasons.
Since then I’ve worked with amazing celebrities, traveled the world, been a judge for numerous editorial Beauty Awards, won an American Influencer Award, been featured in various publications, had TV appearances, and worked with incredible brands like ghd, The WetBrush, and Kitsch.
“My biggest advice is to remember that fear is never a good enough reason not to do something. If there’s something you’ve been wanting to do but are scared, go for it! You’ll soon find out that it wasn’t as scary as you thought it would be.”
