Lady Gaga's Hairstylist Frederic Aspiras's Career Story
Frederic Aspiras: From Houseless to Oscar-Nominated Hairstylist
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Even still, hairstyling wasn't a clear path for Aspiras at first. He was still figuring out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life. "I knew at a very young age that I was pretty different from a lot of people," he says. Part of that feeling stemmed from questioning his sexuality at a young age while desperately wanting to escape his home life.
Aspiras initially thought he wanted to be an actor, which was a career his father encouraged; his mother, on the other hand, wanted him to become a businessman or doctor. But at 13, he began helping out around his mom's salon after school. "With Asian families, you work with the family business," he says. "Every weekend, for years, I would go over and help her. Just me and her."
He observed his mom interacting with her clients and was in awe of how she had the ability to make them happy by transforming their hair. "I wanted to do that, so I started to look through magazines and play around with my sister's hair." Being a fast visual learner, Aspiras honed his skills at not only styling but also makeup artistry, which piqued his mom's interest. He had a natural talent, and it didn't take long for him to start working beside her with his own clients.
"I would talk to my mom's hair clients and learn about their lives," he says. "To me, that was the most intriguing thing about the craft itself — the connection."
Still, he wasn't sure that's where he wanted to be in the long-term: "I knew I didn't want to work in a hair salon — I [did that] my entire teen and early adulthood," he says. "It was very heartbreaking for her to hear that, but I told her I wanted to find myself. I didn't want to just carry on what she was doing."