After six years of running Salon Benders, now Benders Art Collective, owner Jessie Santiago closed the doors of its brick-and-mortar space in October 2023. Despite the closing, Santiago continues to offer her services to community members who wish to work with her.
Benders Art Collective and Santiago take a trauma-informed approach to beauty and healing services. There are various steps taken to determine both the hairstylist and the client are comfortable throughout the process.
“The practitioner must be engaged with their own trauma work. She must know and respect her boundaries, expectations, shortcomings, and strengths as an individual first,” Santiago said. “Once she knows enough about herself, she can indeed hold space for another. In short, it begins with the self.”
Alongside preparation of the self, Santiago works with licensed therapists to ensure her practices are valid. When it comes to choosing clients, Santiago primarily works with queer people of color as she can relate to their experiences and share their perspectives.
It is a connection Santiago notices helps her and the client feel safer. Santiago has been diagnosed with CPTSD, ADHD and autism and often wished for a space where she could be herself, surrounded by people who could understand her.
Benders Art Collective is her way of creating that space. Regardless of how long Santiago has been seeing a client, she always asks for consent before touching someone.
“Implied consent isn’t always enough for some people. For example, folks with sexual or violent trauma can be more sensitive to people touching them from behind or with their eyes closed,” Santiago said. “Even though you are coming to the hair salon where you know touching will eventually happen, it is in my practice to communicate during moments of physical touch.”
Santiago has resources available for people experiencing forms of domestic violence and abuse; and keeps herself informed of signs. Along with resourcing, Santiago uses unassuming language by asking for name changes and pronouns each time she sees a client in case there have been changes since she last saw them.
Despite the love and care Santiago put into her work, she had to close her space due to finances. Rent in Long Beach is expensive and to keep the salon open, Santiago would have to either pay her employees less or charge her clients more.
“I literally already felt like I was not paying my employees what I wanted to pay them and what they deserved. And I already thought that my clients were paying at the top of their range,” Santiago said.
“I had to bend my integrity and justify those things for me to survive and for the salon to survive, and I had to change my value structure. My values then would have been money over people, and that wasn’t authentic to me. So I had to do the hard and very sad work of closing my salon down.”
It hurt her to close knowing that it would mean people losing their jobs and she would be losing the inclusive space she created. However, she continues to be grateful for the learning experience it was and for the friends she made along the way.
“I still yearn for a space where I belong, but I am also beginning to realize that it may be a state of mind I must keep working on. Perhaps that place is wherever my feet are,” Santiago said.
Santiago still has a space where she offers her services. Her partner of six years bought a home two years ago and has given the detached garage space to Santiago so she could have a studio space.
In this new space, Santiago continues providing her trauma-informed haircuts as well as teaching and practicing energy work, meditation, sound healing, Reiki, working with therapists, and in the future will offer hypnotherapy services. Santiago is starting a two-year hypnotherapy program on March 19, and she is excited to delve into that interest of hers.
The closing of Salon Benders in October, despite being a sad moment for Santiago, has given her the freedom to return to the roots of the work she set out to do and reconnect with herself.
While running her business, it was difficult for Santiago to see clients who wanted to get their hair done by her specifically. Now she can personally help those clients, some of whom she hadn’t seen in a long time.
She sometimes gets new clients, either through the Benders Art Collective website or via referral. She does a screening process to ensure that she’ll be able to help the client and the client is aware of Santiago’s current workplace.
Other Salon Bender clients that Santiago didn’t work with either found another salon or followed their hairstylist, much like Santiago’s clients followed her to her new workspace. With less logistics to worry about, Santiago has reconnected with her passion for painting and has been able to spend more time with her family.
“I hadn’t spent Christmas with my mother in 15 years. And she just came here,” Santiago said. “She just retired and came here to California from the East Coast and spent three months here with me and we had the most beautiful, healing, restorative three months.”
To other women entrepreneurs and business owners, Santiago encourages them to know who they are and what they value; to keep the values close to them and never let them waver. Much like she closed her salon because she could not pay her employees less or charge her clients more, Santiago urges future business owners to know their values so they can be confident when making difficult decisions.
“Pay yourself first, make sure you’re okay first, and then expand and branch out. And you know, try to have fun,” Santiago said. “Try to have fun throughout the process and don’t forget your moments of joy and your moments of gratitude to the people who have stood by you this whole entire time.”
While Santiago is unsure if she’ll ever open another Salon Benders location, she is happy with her current space and name. She is choosing to express herself in the mediums she wants to and is sure to do more, and be more in the future.
“I feel like if you were to find me again in a year, everything would be so different. And I’m excited, finally to see, you know, what else I have available to me,” Santiago said. “I just turned 41 and I feel like I’m in a whole new chapter of my life and I’m kind of rediscovering myself in my career.”
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