Fri, 03 Apr 2020 01:29:39 -0700WeeblyWed, 26 Apr 2017 03:12:33 GMThttps://www.hannaharose.com/beauty-queen/introduction​My is Hannah Augusta Rose. I am a 22 year old girl, born and raised in Greensboro, NC. I love music that involves actual instruments and I love people who cause a scene. I chase boys too intensely and I forget more than I remember. I am a whole lot of fun. My favorite feeling in the entire world is when you laugh so hard, no noise is exiting your body, and for a few seconds you are so choked up in joy, your heart almost stops. I live for moments like that. I also like to wear black boots with a heel, they fit every season. I enjoy a good competition. I work in the beauty industry for a living, so appearance is obviously very important to me. But if we are being honest, appearance is important to everyone, which is why I’ve decided to write this book. Being beautiful is 75% an act. I’m going to teach you how to do it. 

Now, for starters, I am not by any means addressing myself as “all knowing”. I can’t even get the guy across the street to date me, let alone get a waiter to text me back. I am, by no means, judging anything or anyone. I am just saying that I spend two hours a day at maximum with several different kinds of people and what I have learned from listening to these people is that life moves incredibly fast. There is no controlling it. You never really know whats going to be handed to you. Life is always changing. Now there are three things that matter when traveling at high speed: 1. You know who you are and you who you are not. 2. You do not accept partial love. 3. Always trust your gut. I know, it sounds fucking cliche, but its true.


Something happens at 22. You think you know who you are and then all of a sudden you truly begin to face forward and what you know doesn’t really fit or make sense anymore. Your every day life becomes foreign. It almost like what I imagine waking from a coma would be like. Moving slow motion in a regular speed frame. You never really feel a connection. Then suddenly you find yourself making important life decisions through a clouded mind. You become lost in ambiguity. 


Heather Herron, who I will explain later, always said, “If you’re looking for a good way to tell someone bad news, there isn’t one. If you think it’s going to be terrible, it’s going to be terrible. It will be hard. There is no getting around that. You will get through it and you will be fine. But right now, you’ve gotta choose you. No one else ever will. You’ve got to stand up for yourself, before you stand for anything else. If you don't like something, change it.” 
So, I decided to start my life over. I decided to live my life the way I wanted it to be. I had no plan or any sense of direction. But I chose me.
 And I never looked back. ]]>Wed, 26 Apr 2017 03:10:13 GMThttps://www.hannaharose.com/beauty-queen/we-say-yall-in-the-southWe Say Y’all In the South.


    I have lived my entire life in Greensboro, North Carolina. I am pretty much the stereotype of the modern southern girl. I am a hair stylist, I own Jack Rodgers. I have a couple of those tee shirts that are from restaurants at the beach. I enjoy a glass of sweet tea and I drink whiskey. I have a football team I cheer for and I wear dresses to the games. I know every Dixie Chick and Darius Rucker song. I hate avocado.(Sorry, not sorry) And I will never give up meat, ever. Now, for all of you going “What about your gun and your boots?” Allow me to break it down for you. I said southern not country. Point being that all of us living below the Mason Dixon Line are not hillbillies. Greensboro is one of the bigger cities in North Carolina. So growing up, between catholic school and what I experienced of public school, I knew like 4 rednecks. Once, in middle school, a kid got his head stuck in a locker because he tried to put his motorcycle helmet on….. While it was IN the locker. (idk why he had a motorcycle helmet, he was a middle schooler). But I assumed that was how the rest of the South was. Nothing too crazy just some random kids shooting off fireworks in the school parking lot. It was not until I enrolled in beauty school did I have the pleasure of meeting some of Greensboro’s finest country women. And I learned first hand how different of a world I was living in. 
    I should begin by saying beauty school saved my life. Up until I enrolled in beauty school I was not a person I was proud of. I was a stuck up, know it all, brat. In high school I was not nice.  I graduated in the top of my class, I got into every college I applied to. Basically I was on the fast track to success. But as luck would have it, I sucked at college. I felt lost and all of a sudden unsure about my future and myself. Then I met a boy, destroyed my self esteem in a not so good relationship and as a result became this fat, spineless, pathetic version of myself. So after dropping out of college, I enrolled at Leon's Beauty School.  Am I a cliche or what?
    To set the stage for you-Mrs. Leon, the owner of Leon’s Beauty School, was the hair tycoon of Greensboro. The Leon's empire engulfed the school, several salons throughout the city and surrounding small towns, and just about every hair stylist in greensboro was at some point trained by her. By the time I went to Leon's, Mrs.Leon had already left us, so the hair empire was run and owned by her daughter, Ms. Parker. The school was inside an old tobacco warehouse. When you entered there was about 115 work stations, two walls lined with shampoo bowls and into the back you had the classrooms enclosed by concrete walls and a concrete floor. When all the students are working on the main floor at their stations, its sort of has a sweatshop type feel.  We paid to go there and still made the school money off of our services. Also, they had solar panels on top of the  school that generated so much energy that the city of Greensboro paid Leon’s for their electricity. Literally the biggest scam of all time. 
    Now, we are talking about a southern Beauty School. Not the shit you saw in Grease.  Most of the students resembled something like this:  blonde, spray tanned, nails painted—ring finger different from the rest, full face make up, black eye liner, hair extensions, sparkles, etc. I sat in a classroom with teen moms, strippers, drug addicts, porn stars, and like four other normal girls. It was something straight off of MTV Real World. I was so entirely out of my comfort zone and I needed to be. Up until this point in my life, I had always been around basically the same kind of person. This was an opportunity for me to learn to get over myself and get to know these people who would soon become some of my best friends.
 
Here are some of the lessons I learned in Beauty School: 

1. “Possession is three quarters of the law.” 
2. “If you type it the way you say it, its YAW. Not Y’aLL.”
3. “If you're looking for a good way to tell someone bad news, there ain’t one.”
4. Periwinkle is a terrible color for my finger nails. Everyone thinks so. 
5. “You should be able to change your own oil. You should’ve learned that as a kid.”
6. Strippers make a lot of money, like A LOT.
7. “Twerking” is all about moving your ankles.
8. 3 engagements in a lifetime is totally normal. 
9. “I get these diet pills from Nevada, these are illegal here.”
10. If you get candle wax in your hair because YOU HAD A CANDLE ON YOUR HEADBOARD. Hit it with a flat iron, it'll come right out. 

The most influential of everyone I met in Beauty School was Heather Herron, my very first “country” friend. I knew she belonged in a book the minute I met her. Everything that comes out of her mouth is comedic gold. Heather Herron stands about five feet tall, platinum blonde, and some days, if she remember to put her tanning lotion on, she is golden brown (orange). Now Heather wears lots of bright colors, lots of make up but as she told the girl she shoved against the wall at lunch one day “I may look like Barbie but I will redneck kick your ass.” She has the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met and she thinks about things in ways that normal people do not. Heather looks at life in the retrospective. In another life, Heather might of worked for NASA.
    My clients often would get the treat of being entertained by Heather while I worked quietly behind them. I just let her perform because she is SO funny, plus I could just work and not have to pretend I was listening. She has a way of making people feel at ease, she has a way of making them feel important. She is honest and will tell you what she thinks about everything. And if she doesn’t say it out loud she is probably going to post it on Facebook later that night. I heard her say to a client once “Honey, in Burlington, when your upset about something you post that shit on Facebook.” 
    Heather is from Burlington, NC which is only 15 minutes away from Greensboro but if you asked Heather it was a different country. She enjoyed the small town feel, the country roads, the tease hair and cowboy boots. If you don’t drive a truck Heather is not interested. The thought of New York City makes her nauseous. She likes things to be simple and sweet. “I went to Raleigh once and everyone looked like they walked out of Vogue Magazine, I said ‘Hell naw, I do not belong here.’”
    Heather also believes herself and God have a special connection. “Higher the hair the closer to God” is always her excuse for the ridiculous height she teases her hair too. She didn’t eat pork for three months because she thought Baptists didn’t. She always asks me if we believe in the same God just because I went to Catholic school. She always has advice that makes your heart cringe. It comes from somewhere deep down inside her, almost like you are talking to God. She said to me once “If you want something, you have to say thank you first.” 
What a way to look at life. 
    Heather taught me how to embrace myself. She taught me how to love myself, how to know what I am worth, and how to defend that. Probably my favorite story about Heather is how at five months pregnant she walked out on her boyfriend/baby-daddy because he was getting into drugs. Trust me, in North Carolina that doesn’t happen a lot. Heather, pregnant as can be, packed all of her things and left in a matter of four hours and never looked back. How many of us can say we would have done that? Leave security and comfort because you know you deserve better. When I was debating ending a relationship of three years Heather said to me “If you’re waiting for the right time, there isn’t one. It's going to be bad and it's going to be painful but after all of that you will be free. And you deserve someone that doesn’t make you small, you deserve someone who sees you for what you are and loves every bit of it.” As obvious as it should have been to me, I needed to hear it. 
There is nothing you could say to Heather that would make her doubt you. She sees everyones soul in its true form.  
    She is the strongest person I have ever met and yet she had a secret fragility behind all of that. After her daughter Emily was born, Heather began dating a guy who she got engaged to after enough time had passed. But he still wasn’t the right guy. After he behaved like an idiot, Heather packed his stuff up and had it waiting for him at the door. She switched over all of the bills after he shut off the power on her and her two year old. She handled the break up with strength and grace. Two weeks later I found myself sitting on my bedroom floor with Heather in her moment of weakness. She sat there and cried and for a minute I could see how afraid she was. I could see how much pressure she was under. I could see through the front that she put on for everyone else. And she was beautiful. See, it’s not just confidence that can be beautiful, it's the balance of your confidence and your vulnerability. She sat there dreading going home to an empty house with her daughter. She knew it was only a matter of time before her daughter noticed Heather was upset or that the ex was no longer there. I had no idea what to say, I held her hand and hugged her. I tried to give her back the strength she had given me. I reflected on the fact that I had only known this person for a handful of months and I knew we would be friends the rest of our lives. I knew that she would be okay, I found solace in the fact that even the strongest people have weak moments. “I do not love like normal people,” she said “I love with my whole soul. I give Love everything I have.” She wore her heart on top of her suit of armor. Vulnerable, just like the rest of us. 


She taught me how to be strong and when to be weak. She taught me to always say Thank You and she taught me never to settle. She taught me to think more for myself. And she taught me to have a little faith. She also taught me how to make hamburger casserole and for that I am eternally grateful. 




I would not be the person I am today without my angel, Heather Herron. Turns out I needed a lil’ country in my life. I learned a lot in beauty school, I think I ended up a pretty good hair dresser. I grew as a person while I was there, I found a new sense of direction. But when I look back at that time in my life, all I remember is Heather. Heather and that loud ass mouth of hers.
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