Beloved hairdresser stays in style at 73
Polly Ann Sanders-Peterson cutting-edge trailblazer
When you call Polly & Co. at Sola Salon Studios to request an appointment, you may get the answering machine. The cheerful voice of Polly Ann SandersPeterson asks you to leave a detailed message and then adds, “Remember, you’re awesome. And I’ll take care of you soon.”
The friendly voice and supportive message sum up the stylist, who has been cutting hair and looking after clients in Denver for more than 50 years.
“Polly has this loving personality. She listens well. She’s excellent at what she does. She becomes your friend and your confidant,” longtime customer Debbie Jackson said.
Jackson has been coming to Sanders-Peterson, 73, for cuts and styling for about 35 years — her husband, even longer.
“I follow her everywhere she goes,” Jackson said. “I truly believe she’s one of the best stylists anywhere.”
But Sanders-Peterson’s career didn’t come without obstacles, and early on, one of the biggest was her skin color.
When Sanders-Peterson started classes at Denver’s Hollywood Beauty College in 1964, she was the first and only black woman at the school. Her first client there was a white woman who left rather than let a woman of color do her hair.
“The manager of the school taught me then, ‘Polly, don’t let people determine your worth,’ ” she said. “And he told (the client), ‘If you don’t get your hair done by Polly, then you won’t get it done.’ So she left.”
It was discouraging, SandersPeterson said, and she knew her path would continue to be difficult. After graduating, she couldn’t find a salon willing to hire a black woman.
When she answered helpwanted ads, salon owners said they no longer needed anyone or they assumed she wanted to work on nails, a job that was more common for women of color at the time.
Sanders-Peterson was hired at a Hispanic salon almost a year after graduating. She got a footing in the industry and later moved from salon to salon, honing her skills, developing new techniques and picking up tips from salon owners and fellow stylists.
Soon, her talent became hard to ignore. In the late 1970s, she was asked to train with noted hair designer Michael Taylor, to whom she credits a large amount of her expertise, especially in the area of customer service.
Taylor took Sanders-Peterson to Paris to assist him at a hairstyling competition and to New York City to meet renowned stylists. They worked together for seven years at the Antoine Du Chez salon in Cherry Creek.
Another mentor encouraged Sanders-Peterson to get more broadly involved in the industry. So she helped modernize a national hairdressers association, work that included abandoning the starched white uniforms of older times and integrating salons and barbershops to allow men and women to get haircuts at the same place.
In another attempt to push for progress in the industry, Sanders-Peterson offered free haircuts on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in hopes of seeing white and black women sitting side by side in the same salon.
And Sanders-Peterson was instrumental in improving hairdressers’ wages, encouraging stylists across the country to forget about tips and boost their flat rate. At national hairdressers meetings, she rallied stylists from all states to “charge their worth” and put up signs in their salons with new prices. Sanders-Peterson upped her own
prices by $8 to $10.
“We wanted to be able to say, ‘We have worth and value as your hairdresser. We want to be able to charge what we think we’re worth,’ ” Sanders-Peterson said.
Despite success on many fronts, Sanders-Peterson says there’s still one change she’d like to see in the industry. She said she still feels like she’s “the black hairdresser.”
“When clients are referred to me, (other hairdressers) will say, ‘She’s great … but you know, she’s black,’ ” Sanders-Peterson said.
“It doesn’t really bother me,” she added, “because at the end of the day, I know I can do all types of hair.”
Still, it’s something she hopes will change.
“I would like to see more African-American women in this industry become business owners, I would like to see more developed products in this industry for us, and I definitely would like to see some black woman come along who could build a chain like (Sola), because we have the capability,” SandersPeterson said. “We have the opportunities, the doors and the mentors to do it.”