Beauty in Transition is an artistic project that established a pop-up mobile hair salon providing beauty services including a hair wash, cut, color and/or style service to willing participants living in transitional housing. By provoking face-to-face dialogue in a calming recuperative salon environment, this project aims to facilitate empathetic understanding and to unravel the reductive label of homelessness.

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Care ethics were at the center of this project, and they shaped my artistic decisions along the way. The gesture of care through social art practice is not a one-way paternalistic service; care ethics perpetuate relational and nonhierarchical values toward the goal of equal exchange. Although I secured professional hair stylists from top rated salons to volunteer, Beauty in Transition did not remain a one-way service. Throughout the project I met many transitional housing residents who had cosmetology backgrounds and they participated as service providers. In addition, a few of the stylists shared that they had been homeless in the past and the project brought them into a position to aid a community they were once part of. At a glance, you would not be able to separate who was homeless from who was not.