I have really curly, blonde hair. It’s always been this way—it will always be this way, but I didn’t always like it. I distinctly remember hating it. My mother and my sister had completely different hair than I did, and my dad had curls, but he kept his at a close crop so you couldn’t even tell. Essentially, I was left to my own devices in terms of what to do with my hair. When I’d go to get it cut, no one tended to understand curly hair. They’d never heard of a dry cut, didn’t think to do a conditioning treatment, and all I thought to do was ask for them to straighten it. So, I walked around with terrible hair for a good portion of my formative adolescent years, then by high school, I had scoured the internet enough that I’d found a hair-care routine that worked for me.

Getting a haircut wasn’t a fun or creative experience for me. It was a necessary evil I would force myself to do every six months when my split ends would get so bad that my hair would stop curling. It would always end with the stylist having no idea what product to use, making it up as they went, then I would go home, wash it, style it again myself and just be glad that I could run my fingers through it again.

When I got to Washington University, I never really had a plan for haircuts. I figured I’d get it cut when I went home or I’d just pop into Bear Cuts and ask for the bare minimum. That was until I met Jasmine Hill, a professional haircare specialist at Bear Cuts.

Courtesy of Jasmine Hill

Jasmine Hill styles a student’s hair at the Bear Cuts business on the South 40. Her expertise include coloring, styling and hair care. Hill can work with any hair texture, and has been at Bear Cuts since January of 2017, 3 months after its initial opening.

I walked into Bear Cuts in May of my freshman year and asked her to dye my hair pink. She did it and exceeded all of my expectations. When it grew out and faded over the summer, people would come up to me and say that the way it grew out made me look like I had been born with pink hair. Meaning, Jasmine had done an extremely good job with it.

In April of 2018, I came in to see Jasmine again because I desperately needed a cut. It had probably been over half a year, and I was struggling. I liked her, and I had trusted her to dye my hair; so, why not a cut?

Long story short, she cut off all my hair. It was the biggest cut I’d ever had since the one time in 5th grade I went to a “Sweet and Sassy” and some teenager gave me the shortest, most uneven cut of my life and I cried for a week straight. But I didn’t cry for a week afterwards. I loved it. I had a lot of misgivings when it was first proposed to me, but I ended up loving it, and now I come in every couple of months.

Jasmine used a technique with me that she ended up telling me about later.

“I like to talk to people while I’m holding the hand mirror behind them and literally show them what an inch looks like and what two inches looks like…” Jasmine said. “I can show it to you before in real-time and just give you what you’re expecting…If I just ask you the right questions and really address all of your concerns, then every haircut usually turns out how it’s supposed to.”

I came in to interview Jasmine recently because not only is she a well-known name on campus, but she’s a person that seems to elicit an extremely positive response from students. When I came in to the shop, she immediately had me sit down for a shampoo. We got to talking about specifically Wash. U. students’ hair, and how a high stress environment effects it.

“The cool thing about myself is that I can do any ethnicity and any texture of hair. So, being at Bear Cuts, I love that because our clients are so diverse. It’s a lot of men’s haircuts first before anything, but the students love just getting haircare…Students who are under pressure and studying a whole lot have a lot of dry scalp issues. Their anxieties create a dry scalp. So, for that, I do a lot of massage on the scalp at the shampoo bowl. That’s why I’m always prompting to just get the five-dollar shampoo, because I’ll massage the scalp, trigger that blood flow—blood flow to the hair follicles really does stimulate hair growth and the hair being stronger.

She’s been at Bear Cuts since January of 2017, only a few months after its opening, and she worked in the same space eight years ago when it was owned by three other students. She’s made a name for herself in that time. With Bear Cuts servicing around 1,700 people on campus, her client base is between 700 and 800 returning students, and it’s easy to see why.

Jasmine pretty much always knew she wanted to work with hair and fashion.

“I graduated from high school in ’02, and when I graduated, I didn’t make a college plan in high school. I lived and ate and breathed fashion and hair, literally. That’s all I really cared about—fashion and hair. I wish it was the other way around…My college plan was to go show my mom these plans to go to Italy and tell her how I needed it to be funded, and that was not an option. So, I started out at a community college, and then [I rediscovered that] I loved hair, I loved makeup, and the artistry of it. So, my parents invested in me to go to cosmetology school so I could one day own my own business. So, that’s how I got into it, with the intent to, one day, own my own business and go to graduate art school.”

Courtesy of Jasmine Hill

Jasmine Hill applies her hair care skills to a client, styling the student’s hair in Bear Cuts, a shop located on the South 40.

She’s taken that passion, and she’s cultivated it.

“I’ve been doing it for thirteen years. It’s become more like my calling where it’s naturally just my gift…I would take hair and use it for ways to study with children. Doing shampoos on small kids, and I could start reading to those kids. I just like it because it’s a way for me to work with people…and I’m good at it.”

Clients come to her just to unwind.

“What’s really fascinating is that students want to come after their tests. I find it’s like a treat. After their tests they’re like, I just had the biggest exam, let’s get this going’.”

When I came in to talk, she offered me the eyebrow waxing chair as a place to nap if I ever needed it, and she gives all of her clients the same offer.

Jasmine has big, wholesome dreams for her future in haircare.

“I just want to have a cottage in the backyard, everybody can come over and have coffee, and I can wear my pajamas and then we can do your hair … I don’t even have to leave.’”

But until then, she’s happy where she is.

“Bear Cuts, to me, is a place where people can create a community.”

In the future, she hopes to have a healthy hair education event and host a “cut-athon” with Bear Cubs Running Club. She sees the row of stores becoming a big community and putting on productions. In the next two weeks, she’s scheduling body make-up airbrushing for Halloween costumes. Essentially, she wants to, and is, doing it all.

I left Bear Cuts with revitalized hair, a smile on my face and excited to go back in a couple of months. Had a hard week? A hard month? A hard year? Go get your hair shampooed by Jasmine. You deserve it.