It could all come together to be a slightly scary sort of presentation, but then you see Heather with her clients, and she is gentle and solicitous. She holds a young woman’s foot in her lap at the manicure station and leans in close to soak the feet and clip the nails, holding each toe as she guides the clipper through the cut. When she is done, she looks to the client and asks, “Short enough?” and the client looks up nonchalantly from her magazine, furrows her brow a bit and says, “A little shorter.” And Heather, with her blood-red vampire haircut simply bends to the toes to trim a little more.

Vivian, part of the newest group of students, is fresh out of high school. “I live for hair,” she says. She is just a half-beat behind, not quite getting the joke or hearing the comment until a second or two has passed. And then there she is, having her own delayed giggle or “Aha!” She looks very young, with her lavender plastic eyeglass frames and her straight brown hair cut in a simple pageboy. But she dreams of glamour: “Yup. I’m gonna get a weave – gold streaks crisscrossed into the top of my hair. And my dream haircut is just like Jennifer Aniston. I’m tryin’ to grow out my bangs so I can get the layers just right.” She rakes at the hair on the sides of her head to show how the layers should come forward. “I’ve always known I wanted to be a beautician,” she says. “I started here at A’ Art in high school as, like, an intern, just helping out around the shop. And then after graduation,” she pauses to smile brightly, “I got in the program!”

Roxanne is also a newbie. She’s in her early twenties and has never cut her dark, waist-length hair. “And I’m not about to,” she says. “You see all these girls who come in with long hair and then they cut it for class practice. Oh my God, I just wouldn’t be me without my hair.” Sometimes Roxanne curls her hair into locks of spiraling tendrils. Other times she pulls it back in a big clip. Roxanne wears a perfect foundation that puts some pink into her olive complexion. She also wears shiny white eyeliner and thick mascara that make her look like a refugee from the Mod Squad. She combines all of this with dark denim bellbottoms and chunky black boots that click and clomp as she walks through the school. “You know,” she says, “I want to make people feel good by making them beautiful. I want to take care of them.”

The boys of A’ Art College of Beauty are Ray, Dino, and Adam. Ray is the newest, part of the group still in classroom sessions. He is tough looking and compact – a Japanese kid with honey-colored skin and super-black hair he slicks from crown to nape. His face is round and wide, punctuated by hazel eyes, high cheekbones and a strong, jutting lower jaw.

He’s a gum chewer – sometimes he chews up front between his incisors, other times he rolls the wad of gum back between his molars. When he speaks, his voice is deep, his dialect hinting at his California upbringing: “Duuude, like how’m I supposed to get these finger waves to go all the fuck the same direction around the head?” He has learned to mostly ignore the girls in class. They poke a little fun at him, at his stoic attitude, his male-ness.