Suzanne Maurice

For Ontario-based salon owner Suzanne Maurice, her interest in a career as a hairstylist started when she was watching and learning from inside the walls of another hair salon. “When I was 15, I went with my mom and my sister to their hairstylist, Renato Demicheli,” she says. “He amazed me because he was so precise. Before that, I didn’t understand the skills involved in hairstyling. I started just showing up at his salon and asking him a bunch of questions. I was just watching all of the things he was working on and trying to learn as much as I could.”

For Maurice, her interest in hair began at an even younger age. “I was always artsy and crafty, so I would create hairdos on my dolls or friends as a way to work with an artistic fibre,” she says.

“I never thought about it as a career until I kept going back to Renato’s salon to watch him, while working part-time in a salon, and then I decided to attend hair school after I finished high school.”

Elements of Inspiration

For her 2023 finalist collection for Ontario Hairstylist, Maurice garnered inspiration from lace shirts worn by her models. “When it comes to creating collections, I normally go through daily life keeping an eye out for things that may inspire me,” she says. “I saw the lace shirts and the muted tones really inspired me. The lace was so light and dreamy, and the ethereal movement created in the lace reminded me of smoke, so I ran with it.”

Maurice says she wanted to create different textures in her models’ hair to represent each state of smoke (solid, liquid and gas). “For the model with the pink hair, in order to mimic the solid state of smoke, I used a curling iron set and backcombed the hair so I could create the billowing shape. I added a bit of structure to it with the braids,” she says. “To represent gas, I used a rickrack set with very small pieces of my model’s hair, brushed it out and added the puffs by her face.” For her last look, Maurice created a finger wave set to give the hair a wet look and represent liquid, and encourages all hairstylists to learn how to create finger waves.

Putting Herself Out There

While Maurice began competing because of the extra free time she had during the pandemic’s lockdowns, she continues to compete because of the creative outlet it offers her. “Getting to do really big creative stuff outside of the salon’s regular hustle and bustle really brought me back to life and woke up that creative side to hairstyling that had been long asleep,” she says. “I was focusing so much on the grind of getting everybody in and out, so competing is a good outlet for me. It’s a different animal and it uses a different part of my brain and heart, and I think the parts that it does use are the ones that drew a lot of us to the industry in the first place.”