Afiya Mbilishaka, PhD, always loved doing hair. “[As a teenager], I was my family’s hairstylist. I’d have a lawn chair set up at family cookouts where I would do my cousins’ and my aunts’ hair,” she says.
As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, she set up shop in her dorm room, where classmates would stop by to get braids before a date or their hair done before the big football game. “I didn't charge people, so I think that's why they came to see me,” Dr. Mbilishaka says, laughing. “But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the process, I enjoyed the conversations while I was doing someone's hair, to understand what was happening in their lives or on campus or with school.”
This drive to better understand people led her to study psychology as an undergrad and go on to earn a PhD in clinical psychology, all the while continuing to do hair. “I remember talking to my aunt on the phone one day and telling her I wasn’t sure if I wanted to study psychology after I graduated or go to hair school and become a stylist,” Dr. Mbilishaka says. “And she said, ‘Why can’t you do both?’ I don’t think she was telling me to do both at the same exact time, but that’s the way I interpreted it.”
For years, Dr. Mbilishaka bounced from seeing therapy clients in her private practice to talking to people about their worries at the shampoo bowl. Then, in 2019, she married her two passions by founding PsychoHairapy.
“PsychoHairapy is using hair as an entry point into mental health services,” she says. The organization offers a 12-hour training course in which Dr. Mbilishaka teaches salon workers how to understand the signs and symptoms of mental health issues in their clients along with what she calls “micro-counseling” skills. “This includes how to assess a client for harm to self or others, so that includes suicidal thoughts, homicidal thoughts, and self-injury,” she says. “And then getting into how to impart insights or make referrals to resources.”
PsychoHairapy is just one of a few organizations in the US and abroad that have cropped up in recent years to help hairstylists embrace the care-giving position they hold in society and lean in to their long-held role as “unofficial therapists.”
The connection between hair and mental health
No one knows exactly why people have a tendency to treat their stylists like mental-health counselors (something that 43 percent of hair professionals agree happens with regularity, according to a 2021 survey of 13 million pros by the appointment-booking app Booksy), but there are a lot of theories.
Licensed clinical psychologist Seth Meyers posited in Psychology Today that it could be chalked up to body positioning: The fact that the stylist stands behind their client and speaks to them through the mirror, rather than face-to-face, could make it easier for the client to unload. Maybe it’s because clients feel confident that their hairdressers don’t know their friends or family, and can therefore speak freely without worrying that their worries will get back to the source. Or, it could be because the trust hairdressers build with their clients extends beyond the balayage. Going for a major chop or dramatic dye job is a leap of faith, and if clients trust their stylists to catch them, why wouldn’t they trust them with more?
“I think a lot of it is just that we are in a business of people. We're building relationships,” says Brooke Jordan, co-founder of The Bird House salon in Brooklyn, New York. “If I see someone, it's not in my nature to think that I'll see them never again. It's like, ‘You're my person that I take care of now.’ We want to know people's lives.”
When Jordan and her sister Nicole Jordan Hubert co-founded The Bird House in 2011, this desire to embrace each client as a full person acted as their guiding philosophy — and is reflected in a unique slate of services that appear on The Bird House’s list of offerings.
“Recently go through a break-up? Had a baby? Lived through a pandemic? Starting an exciting new job and want to make a great first impression? Book an emo cut if this haircut is an extension of your current emotional state,” the salon’s menu says. Or, clients of The Bird House can choose to book a complimentary “chemo cut” if they’re undergoing cancer treatment or a “gender-affirming cut” to support an identity transition.
The success of these services — in 2023 alone, The Bird House has done approximately 115 emo cuts and 25 chemo cuts — is evidence that both hairstylists and clients are waking up to ways your hair is connected to your mental state.
According to Dr. Mbilishaka, the entanglement of hair and mental health makes salon workers uniquely situated to spot issues. One reason is because “hygiene indifference,” or difficulty with “hygiene tasks, including showering, brushing teeth, doing laundry, or brushing hair,” registered nurse Ivory Smith writes on the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) blog, “is a common symptom of mental health conditions (particularly depression).”
“There are a lot of things that the hair can tell you about a person,” says The Bird House salon director and master stylist Alyssa Kay. “[You might see] matting in the back, or an alopecia spot. And then it starts to become a conversion of, ‘I’m stressed, I have all these things [going on].’ And [as a stylist], you just kind of listen.”
“Our hair can tell us how old we are, maybe what profession we have…It can reflect our physical and mental health,” says Dr. Mbilishaka. “Our hair is such a sophisticated and complex language, we need people who are multilingual to be able to process what’s going on in the hair.” She points out that in certain ancient African societies, unmaintained or poorly groomed hair was seen as a sign of mental illness, “a cry for help to other people in the community to reach out and support you.”
With that in mind, The Bluemind Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to making mental health care more accessible in Africa, created a program called Heal by Hair. The three-day training equips African hairstylists with the tools to identify signs of mental distress in their clients. Thus far, 150 hairstylists in countries including Togo, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon have completed the course.
Ultimately, “I think that our hair is the most easily manipulated part of our bodies, and therefore can be the most connected to our emotional and mood state,” says Dr. Mbilishaka.
From unofficial therapists to trained professionals
Lorenzo P. Lewis, founder of The Confess Project, says he grew up in his aunt’s beauty shop. “I went there every day after school because I was too young to stay home alone,” Lewis says. And in doing so, he came to understand how “beauty shops and salons are a form of our village” for the Black community. “They’re our safe space,” he says.
In its materials, The Confess Project (TCP) points to a sobering discrepancy: While suicide is a leading cause of death for young Black men in the US, only a tiny percentage of mental health professionals are Black. In fact, less than 2 percent of American Psychological Association members identify as such. This means that it can be difficult for Black folks to find mental health professionals who identify with their cultural experiences. By founding The Confess Project in 2016, Lewis sought to meet Black men struggling with mental health issues where they were: at the barbershop. “We recognized a need to equip marginalized Black men and boys with mental health strategies and coping skills to help them move past their pain,” reads the organization's website.
With its Beyond the Shop program, TCP trains barbers and hairstylists to become mental health advocates in their communities. Certified therapists, public health professionals, and educators teach participants “ways of active listening, validation, positive communication, and stigma reduction,” says Lewis. “The Confess Project, it’s about confession. When you confess, you are your best… Our work is really rooted in removing the barriers of stigma and shame [surrounding] mental health.”
To date, TCP has trained over 3,000 barbers who are able to reach an estimated 4 million people per year across 30 states. And in the past year, TCP has begun rolling out programs to bring its evidence-backed training to community guardians and frontline workers in other professions, such as law enforcement officers, community health workers, teachers, and personal trainers. “There are gatekeepers in our communities who have a responsibility to help other people,” says Lewis.
In the United Kingdom, barber, author, and public speaker Tom Chapman similarly saw an opportunity to reach men in need of mental health support at the barbershop. In 2015, he founded the Lions Barber Collective, “an international collection of top barbers which have come together to help raise awareness for the prevention of suicide,” according to the organization’s website.
“Seventy-two percent of those who take their life have had no contact with mental health services in the 12 months before they die, but they have probably had a haircut or beauty treatment,” Chapman says, citing a statistic published by the American Psychiatric Association. With Hair&BeautyTalk (formerly BarberTalk), the Lions Barber Collective facilitates training for salon workers to recognize the signs of depression and suicidal thoughts, engage the client in conversation about their mental health, and direct them to the appropriate support avenues.
In 2020, Chapman began partnering with the hair salon software company Timely to bring educational materials to the platform’s audience of 50,000 hair professionals. In March 2023, Timely began offering a version of Chapman’s Lions Barber Collective training program as a masterclass, available to download for free.
Taking care of the caretakers
None of these training programs are meant to replace professional mental health services. “We don't want to turn [stylists] into doctors or therapists — far from it,” says Chapman. “The idea is that we can bridge the gap between the communities we serve and the resources available."
In November, the UK-based mental-health charity Buckinghamshire Mind launched a pilot project for providing free mental-health training to hairdressers — and training service lead Sophia Magbagbeola says a key part of the program is making sure hairstylists understand that their job is to raise awareness, not provide counseling. “We gently remind them that their role isn’t to be a rescuer. It’s about providing almost emotional CPR...and signposting areas of support services that can be of help,” she says.
Magbagbeola says that core to the course is also providing hairdressers with tools to care for their own mental well-being while they help their clients. “A key part of [the training] is knowing how to maintain those boundaries,” she says. “Because it's really hard, isn't it? We all know, even when it's a friend, it's really hard having the weight of somebody's problem. So [the course is] very much focused on, ‘How do we keep you well in all of this?’”
Boundary-setting is part of PsychoHairapy’s training course as well. “Of course, we want the community to see hair-care professionals as resources, but I think the expectation is unrealistic that they're the sole resource for stress management,” says Dr. Mbilishaka. “So in the training, we do talk about how to express boundaries...to say that, ‘I can hear that you're really struggling right now; although it's important that you can share this with me, I also think that you should reach out to this [mental health professional] that I know.’”
In her work as The Resilient Hairdresser, stylist and psychotherapist Hayley Jepson puts the hair professional first. “I'm concerned with: ‘Who's looking after the hairdresser?’ And I feel that training hairdressers to manage those difficult, sometimes traumatic conversations [around mental health] is smart, but it's not the whole picture,” Jepson says. “We also need to help them process the trauma that's being dumped on them sometimes. And I think we do that through resilience training.”
Jepson says rates of anxiety and burnout are high among salon workers (a 2023 survey by L’Oréal Professionnel Paris found that 65 percent of hairstylists have experienced anxiety, burnout, or depression during their professional career) — and that’s before you add the pressure of providing mental-health support to their clients.
“It's stressful bleaching hair! It's quite a risk. And dealing with the public is tough sometimes,” says Jepson. “As a hairdresser, often 95 percent of your clients are lovely, but 5 percent are difficult — and that 5 percent take a lot of energy… You give and give and give [as a hairdresser], and I noticed that a lot of hairdressers are not very good at taking care of themselves.”
In 2023, Jepson partnered with L’Oréal Professionnel Paris and NAMI to launch Head Up, a free mental health training program that teaches hair-care professionals skills like setting boundaries and fostering self-care practices. By the end of the year, L’Oréal Professional Paris aims to have trained 20,000 hair professionals on the first Head Up module, which is co-led by Jepson. By 2025, the brand is hoping to have trained more than 100,000 pros.
“When I talk about boundaries, I say to people, ‘Boundaries protect what matters to you. And so figure out what matters to you and then figure out what boundaries you need to protect that,’” says Jepson.
Jepson says that, when it comes to protecting salon workers’ mental health — particularly as they increasingly take on their clients’ emotional burden — “hairdressers need to feel really supported by where they work.”
Dr. Mbilishaka says that one way salons can support their employees is by providing time for stylists to decompress between appointments. “Although we want to be booked and busy, we also need to recognize the importance of time off for our own mental health needs,” she says. “I'm mindful that sometimes what a client is talking about could be extremely triggering for a stylist.”
Kay, meanwhile, says she finds support in her community of stylists at The Bird House. If a sensitive situation arises with a client — be it a scalp condition, thinning hair, or triggering personal story — she says that her co-workers are keen to share suggestions for approaching the topic. “We'll go in the back room and say, ‘I’m having trouble with this.’ And then usually there's another stylist who's been in that experience…There's so much education that we give each other.” She also notes that The Bird House protects its stylists’ mental health by allowing them to opt out of the salon’s more emotionally-charged services, such as the chemo and emo cut, if they’re feeling mentally overwhelmed.
Having clients select a chemo, emo, or gender-affirming cut at booking also gives the stylist time to prepare themselves and get in the right headspace for an emotionally high-stakes appointment. “With the emo cut, it’s a signal for us as stylists to be like, ‘Okay, this person sitting in my chair needs a little special love,’” says Jordan.
The way Jordan Hubert sees it, it’s not a coincidence that hair transformations tend to accompany major life milestones, and she’s proud to be able to support her clientele in these moments. “Your hair is the first thing you see when you look at yourself…And when you’ve gone through something, you don’t want your hair to look the same as it did when you experienced [that trauma],” she says.
A stylist recently told Jordan Hubert about one client who booked an emo cut following a breakup. “This client was really upset and crying in the chair. And at the end of the service, [our stylist] hugged her and said, ‘You’ve lost a bunch of hair that he touched, and now you’re growing hair that he’s never touched,” Hubert recalls. “That is so beautiful, this idea of the newness and that physical representation of moving on.” A haircut, she says, is never just about the hair.
Read more stories at the intersection of hair and mental health:
- After Hair Loss, I Learned to Love Myself Again
- Why Hair Salons Are Crucial for Residents of Senior Living Communities
- Therapy Helped Gabrielle Union Repair Her Relationship With Her Hair
Watch the history of curly hair:
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