Pink Strands: October With the Boutique

October is pink-ribbon month everywhere. Here, it is personal.

A meaningful share of our guests are living through breast cancer, in treatment, in recovery, or in the long strange aftermath where the treatment is over and the hair hasn't quite decided to come back. We know these guests by name. We know their stories. October is when we say so, out loud.

This month, a portion of every service at the boutique goes toward our giving program: funding custom hairpieces for guests in treatment who need one and can't reach the price of one. No application essays, no committees. If you're our guest and you're in treatment, tell us. We'll take it from there.

We also want to say something about the language around all of this. "Battle," "journey," "warrior," the vocabulary of illness gets loud in October. We don't use it here. Our guests aren't fighting their hair; they're living their lives, and their hair is one part of that. We keep the volume down and the dignity up. That's the whole philosophy.

If you know someone in the Capital Region going through treatment, a friend, a sister, a neighbor, who is struggling with what the mirror shows, you can send them to us. The first consultation is a conversation, nothing more. Private, unhurried, by appointment only.

And to the guests who've sat in our chair through the hardest year of their lives and come out the other side: we see you. Your hair came back, or it didn't, or it came back different, and you are yourself either way. It has been our privilege to be a small part of that.