Beauty School Reality

What Was The Point?

“Cosmetology school didn’t teach me THAT!”

Whatever “that” is, beauty school wasn’t even designed to teach it to you. 1000-1500 hours is hardly enough time to scratch the rich surface of what it entails to be a successful salon stylist and business person. The true purpose of beauty school is to introduce the foundational knowledge that paves the way for more advanced learning and execution. You’ve got to start somewhere.

In The Beginning

One of the most under-appreciated aspects of beauty school training beyond sanitation is how it develops your ability to understand spatial relationships, body positioning, and tool manipulation. Those hours spent practicing the same roller sets, perm rod sets, and sectioning patterns wasn’t punishment. I vividly remember being held after hours in school on a Saturday evening from 5pm - 7pm doing the same vertical partings in the nape over and over again till I got it.  I wasn’t just building muscle memory, my instructor was trying to train my body to understand space in relation to hair design.

The way you learned to hold your shears, position your body around the chair, and section hair methodically are exercises in developing the personal awareness that makes learning and applying more advanced techniques possible. This foundation allows you to later adapt and modify techniques because your body understands the fundamental relationships between application and outcome.

Every advanced cutting method or color placement technique builds on these foundations. The precision you developed in school doing these basic exercises becomes the platform from which you can confidently explore variations and innovations.

The Invisible Foundation

As stylists develop expertise, their foundational knowledge often becomes so integrated that it feels automatic. You stop consciously thinking about foundations, but that knowledge is still informs your work.

This invisibility can make stylists undervalue their foundational training. They might think, "I learned that years ago, now I need advanced techniques." Beauty school gives an entry-level education in hair design. The knowledge gained there forms the foundation for every technique you'll ever learn and every creative choice you'll ever make.

When you recognize the sophistication of your foundational education, you approach continued learning differently. Instead of looking for completely new information, you seek learning experiences that deepen and expand what you already know. Your intention is to build increasingly sophisticated structures on top of it.

A stylist with strong foundational knowledge can learn new techniques quickly because they understand the underlying structure. They can troubleshoot problems because they grasp the artistic, geometric, and scientific principles at work. They can adapt techniques for diverse hair because they comprehend the structural variations they're working with.

Without this foundation, advanced techniques become a collection of random tricks rather than sophisticated applications of foundational cosmetology theory. Many stylists think artistic development means creating “new” ways of doing something that is untethered from the basics , but the opposite is true. The more deeply you understand foundational principles, the more freedom you have to create. Your artistic vision becomes more sophisticated because it's supported by a deep understanding of technical underpinnings.

You don’t progress beyond the foundation, it’s the platform that what you continuously build upon.