Good Housekeeping: Heather and Fearless Beauty
ARTICLE WRITEN BY LAURA CARNEY
This Hairstylist Is Teaching Beauty Skills to Indian Teens
For her "Fearless Beauty" students, cutting hair could be a path out of poverty.A new haircut can change your life. Just ask the girls in rural Rishikesh, India, who are learning to cut and style hair with Fearless Beauty, a nonprofit school started by New York City hairstylist Heather Packer. For many of them, it's their only hope of learning a marketable skill in a community where girls may be pulled from school as early as age 13 to marry and are rarely allowed to work. "Cutting hair is acceptable for women to do there," says Heather, 40. "It's not something they learn from a book, and they can do it from home."
Heather's first lesson in female empowerment came to her when she was an aimless college student. A friend asked what she would do with her life if it didn't matter what anyone else thought, and Heather surprised herself when she answered, "Style hair." Within a week, she enrolled in beauty school. "Why would you do something stupid like that?" her father asked. Undeterred, Heather excelled in school and landed at Cutler Salon in New York City, where she worked on actresses, fashion models and others.
Growing Awareness
Heather also nurtured her spiritual side by going on yoga retreats in India. "I held my teacher up to be so much higher than I was," says Heather. Then one day he asked her to lead a class. "I had to step up, and I realized that I was enough, that I had held such a limiting belief about myself."
In 2011, she helped her yoga teacher raise funds to open a vocational center in India to teach English and sewing to impoverished children
Shear Confidence
Back in New York City, Heather organized a fundraiser at Cutler. Clients paid $90 for a blowdry, drinks and DJ'd tunes, netting $15,000 for supplies. In January 2015, Fearless Beauty held its first class in the vocational center in India.
"I had three months to teach 10 students what it takes years to learn in beauty school and on the job," says Heather, who used a translator. As she took them through the basics of shampooing, combing, roller sets and more, "I also taught the girls to find their voices, to speak with confidence. The difference in them by the finish was incredible."
Heather ran a second class this year, and two students are already earning money cutting hair. As word of Heather's work has spread, more fund-raisers have been planned in other U.S. cities. "Anybody can do this," she says. "I want to empower the girls, to give them a chance."
Learn more at fearlessbeauty.org.
This story originally appeared in the April 2016 issue of Good Housekeeping.
