The 16-year-old girl, who had been battling depression for a few years, walked into a salon asking for her head to be shaved.
Stylist Kayley Olsson said the teenager had spent most of the summer unable to get out of bed and hadn’t brushed her hair.
Wanted her head shaved
As picture day was approaching the teenager knew she needed help but didn’t think she was worthy of her hair and wanted it all shaved off.
“When she walked in she told us just cut it all off I can’t deal with the pain of combing it out, she called herself worthless for it,” Kayley wrote in a Facebook post.
“It honestly broke my heart and we tried everything we could to keep this child’s hair for her!”
Kayley, a 20-year-old student hairdresser in Waterloo, Iowa, set to work and spent the next 8 hours of her day brushing and conditioning the girl’s matted tresses.
“Cutting her hair was absolutely not a option for me,” Kayley told the BBC. “I knew right then and there that we had to keep as much hair as possible.”
‘You made me feel like me again’
After spending another five hours the following day working on the girl’s hair, Kayley and her fellow stylist Mariah Wenger left her with a beautiful head of hair again.
“We finally made this beautiful girl smile and feel like she IS worth something! Her last words to me was ‘I will actually smile for my school picture today, you made me feel like me again,'” Kayley said.
Find out more about this stylist with a big heart in the clip below.
[arve url=”https://youtu.be/IBEdPHvHRWU” /]
Depression can happen to anyone and anytime, it’s important to look for signs in those around us and do all we can to help.
Please share to spread awareness and understanding. It’s usually the small things we do that can have the biggest impact.