America cheered Alysa Liu’s gold medal winning performance in Milan last week—but perhaps no American more than Kelsey Miller. The St. Louis-based stylist spent five hours perfecting Liu’s halo hair at her downtown salon on Jan. 8. Now that Liu has gone gold, the whole world has been calling, including Allure, Cosmopolitan, and even Vogue.
“It’s pretty incredible,” says Miller. “It’s, like, all the magazines I’ve looked at since I was a little girl. To see my name in them is an amazing feeling.”
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The 39-year-old Soulard resident says the booking came about through a personal connection: A client was having lunch with someone involved with the U.S. Olympic trials in St. Louis when that person mentioned that a figure skater needed help fine-tuning hair she’d done on her own. “And she’s like, ‘Well, my girl’s right down the street. You want me to give her a call?’” It was only after Miller agreed to fit in the last-minute booking that she learned the athlete needing a little help was Liu—and that far from being a little touchup, the work involved bleaching and toning bright platinum stripes into Liu’s dark locks. Not a normal request, but for Miller, who specializes in dimensional color, nothing that freaked her out, either. Nor did the fact that the eye-catching look she achieved would soon be on TVs and smartphones across the U.S.
“I wouldn’t say I was intimidated by it at all, and I didn’t think of her like, ‘Oh my god, she’s gonna be on TV.’ For me, I was just like, taking care of another client in my chair and trying to deliver what they wanted,” Miller says.
It helped that Liu was the ultimate chill client; she came in alone, no entourage, and was just as laidback and fun as she seems on the ice. Says Miller, “She’s so cool and relaxed that it just made me even more like that myself.”
The resulting wave of publicity has been a blast for the Iowa native, who followed a friend to St. Louis in 2015 after swapping college for beauty school in Arizona. Miller went from 600 or so Instagram followers to 4,000 after the initial wave of publicity to now more than 11,000 and counting, and the media onslaught has gone from national to international publications. (That includes her hometown paper, The News of Kalona, Iowa, which proudly noted she’s the daughter of Mel and Luann Miller. Says Miller, “My dad told me he did that, and now they’re like, ‘You’re on the front page!’”) Haircare brands are also reaching out.
The timing is fortuitous—Miller has been preparing to leave her longtime spot at 13th and Washington for a new perch at Copper Mane in Crestwood, a soon-to-open outpost of the Dogtown-based salon. She’s excited about the possibilities before her and the validation that her moment in the spotlight is now bringing.
“I’ve been a hairstylist for almost 20 years, and you spend a lot of hours behind the chair, you spend a lot of long days,” she says. “You work really hard. Sometimes you feel defeated, and sometimes you feel overworked. It’s not always positive. This feels like good karma coming back to me after all the hard work that I put in over the years. I’m definitely trying to take it in the moment, and also trying to just, like, monetize this moment as much as I can. I’m just really like, OK, I have this opportunity in front of me now. Like, what am I going to do with it?”
