Flower Moon: Hair Salon Photography

 **Being a Hair Stylist in the Modern Era: A Mirror's Soliloquy** 

 The chair swivels beneath the weight of yet another soul, another head full of tangled thoughts and dormant dreams. The wax specialist in the corner making friends. They sit before me, the client, eyes vacant, gazing into the mirror as though it might return a piece of them long misplaced. I, the hair stylist, stand behind the glass, wielding my scissors like a poet with her pen, seeking to carve order from the chaos that grows from their roots. It is a strange craft, one of transformation, though sometimes I wonder if it’s anything more than the futile dressing of a wound that refuses to heal. There are friends hair salons down the street on Main. In the modern world, hair has become more than mere strands of keratin sprouting from the scalp. It is identity, rebellion, seduction, conformity. 

A silent scream twisted into a braid, a cry for freedom in a pixie cut, or perhaps, more often, the desire to vanish—disappear into the anonymity of sleek, straightened strands. Each snip of my scissors is a punctuation mark, some more final than others. Some haircuts are exclamations, bold, daring, while others linger with the weight of ellipses, uncertain, unfinished. In my chair, I hold power, fleeting as it is, to make someone feel reborn. Yet what irony—how ephemeral my creations. A storm, a single gust of wind, and my work is undone. 

Time itself is my greatest antagonist; hair grows, and the endless cycle begins anew. But isn’t that the way of all things? A fresh cut is no more eternal than the clouds overhead, shifting and scattering into oblivion. The modern world spins faster than ever, a blur of trends and fads, and with it, hair changes, too. Once, a woman would wear her hair long and pinned, a slow-growing symbol of tradition and virtue. But now? Now, a single night’s sleep might bring the death of a hairstyle, a new aesthetic springing forth like a hydra’s head from the ashes of yesterday’s fashion. One moment the world screams for platinum pixies, the next, it whispers for shadow roots and balayage. I chase these whims as though they might lead me somewhere solid, but I suspect they won’t. 

 Oh, the clients—they speak of freedom, of self-expression, of revolution through razor cuts and asymmetrical bangs. Yet I see their eyes as they watch me work, furtive, flickering, desperate for approval. Freedom, they claim, but the prison bars are in the reflection. Will they like me? Will they love me? Will they recognize me? They do not know what they want. And yet, I must know. I am not merely a hair stylist. I am a confidante, a therapist, a keeper of secrets. They come to me in fragments, their voices raw as they tell me what no one else must know. The divorce. The affair. The job lost or the job never wanted. They speak and I listen, though I am not sure I hear. 

Perhaps I am no more than the mirror itself, reflecting their pain and offering nothing in return but a nod, a sympathetic hum. I change their hair, but what can I do with the gnawing emptiness beneath? Ah, the modern era. Such a cruel, glittering facade. Social media gleams with perfectly coiffed celebrities, each strand of their hair painstakingly placed, airbrushed into submission. And my clients? They arrive with photos of these porcelain idols, thrusting the images before me like holy relics. *Make me this*. 

But what they do not understand is that even these goddesses, captured in pixels and light, are hollow, broken in their own ways. The split ends remain, only hidden for a moment. Still, I cut. I color. I sculpt. I create these fleeting illusions of control in a world spiraling towards entropy. I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror, scissors in hand, my reflection nothing more than a smear in the glass. I sometimes wonder if I am more than a hair stylist. Or perhaps less.