Lora, hairdresser and author of What Your Hair Knows, has spent more than thirty-five years behind the chair. Today, that work continues from an independent restorative hair studio in the UK. She holds a Master’s in Social Psychology, but her work begins with hair, and it has never stopped at hair. Again and again, she has seen a practical request open into something more private: the moment when a woman realises the change in her hair is connected to a change in her life.
The chair
Those years have taught Lora to listen for what sits beneath the appointment. A woman may come in after birth, exhausted by shedding no one warned her about. Another may be recovering from divorce and speak first about a fringe or colour because the rest still feels too raw. In midlife, texture, grey, roots, and regrowth can become the first visible signs that something inside the body or the life has shifted. The request may be practical. The pause before it often tells another story.
The framework
Lora’s Master’s in Social Psychology gave language to patterns she had already been seeing for years. Not as a certificate to hang above the mirror, but as a way of understanding how identity, self-perception, belonging, ageing, and change can gather around the visible self. A hairdresser sees what a woman asks for. Social psychology helps explain why the asking can feel so charged. What Your Hair Knows grew from that meeting point: practical observation shaped by a deeper attention to the woman sitting in the chair. It is not a clinical diagnosis, but a practitioner memoir built on decades of watching women navigate the physical thresholds of their lives.
The book
What Your Hair Knows is where the chair and the framework meet. It is not a makeover book, and it is not a programme for becoming someone better. This is a quiet book for women whose hair has changed during seasons when they have been changing too. It speaks about hair as something practical and visible, but also as something that can carry fatigue, grief, age, hormones, care, neglect, and return.
Not to fix you. To meet you where you already are.