We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jimy Kosmakos a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jimy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

In the salon, idea to execution is as simple as a client bringing a few images on their phone and then realistically translating what they see with what can actually be achieved in that one appointment. Most people don’t realize that you can’t just go from jet black hair to platinum blonde in one sitting, unless you like having a pixie cut from the amount of damage the bleach will leave behind. The pop culture world recently went crazy when Kim K went from black to platinum for her Marilyn Monroe Met gala look but what most didn’t know was they spent 14+ hours in the chair to get there. That’s just unrealistic for the average client and, when you look at close up images of Kim K, you can see that it’s still spotty in the back, which is why she wore her hair slicked back. When have we ever seen Marilyn with slicked back hair?

As far as creative projects outside the salon, I usually try to (badly) sketch out my idea and then go online and collect images for references or clothing and makeup ideas and then make a mood board.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve always played around with hair, ever since I was a kid. I first learned how to style Barbie hair (set the hair and then pour almost boiling hot water on it and then dip in ice water. Barbie hair is synthetic/plastic but I really wanted to change their look), and as a teenager I would convince my friends to let me dye their hair. We would go to the grocery store or Sally’s Beauty Supply and I would get color and then, when their parents were gone, I would change up their hair. My one friend’s mom was definitely not happy when I made her daughter look like a carrot. I thought it looked amazing back then lol.

My mom went to cosmetology school for a little while. When she wasn’t home, I would go through her school book and mess around on her mannequin head. After graduating and taking a stab at the IT world and realizing I hated it, I told my dad I wanted to go to hair school. I thought he would have an issue with it, but he said his sisters would tell him how I would do their daughters’ hair and he gave me his support.

Funny Story. While I was in hair school, I worked at a Ritz camera. I was a horrible employee lol and I refused to learn about digital cameras (they were just coming out, it was the early 2000’s, and now I do photography). But I would convince my coworkers and manager to let me do their hair while we were at work. Not just style, I mean color and highlights. I bought a portable hooded dryer and I’d set up shop in the back room. It was practice for me while I was in school, saved my coworkers a lot of money at the salon, and got me out of dealing with people demanding one hour prints lol. Ever since graduating from hair school, I’ve always tried to stay current and watch or attend many advanced hair classes for coloring, styling, or cutting.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

For a hairstylist I’m a bit of an introvert. I like my alone time and during quarantine while most were complaining about being closed, I took that as an opportunity to grow. I found some online hairdressers with streamable classes and I started watching a lot of YouTube on Instagram’s algorithm and decided I wanted to grow my social media. I had around 750 followers and started to create content on mannequin heads. I posted creative stuff, took a stab at trying to be funny, and posted some educational reels. I wanted to see what I enjoyed posting and, in doing so, my social media started to grow. Then when we could go out again, I had some friends let me do their hair and come up with creative shoots and other hair pages started reposting my work. It is a lot of work and can be very draining. You can spend hours creating, shooting/filming, then editing, only to have no social noise around it because all the hair pages want people with big followings. But every once in a while, when I did get reposted, that little spark would come back and I was on to the next idea.

In this last year, I took a step back because I really wanted to up my technical game. I found advanced online classes and won a spot in a mentorship program with L’oreal. It can be hard to find balance, because you get wrapped up in the numbers game of likes and reposts, but it’s hard to work, do social media, take classes, be in a mentorship program, and still have a life. I started hating creating, but creating is what gave me my spark for hair back when I went through a dark period and started thinking about other careers. So my balance was to drop one thing for this year. So I create now only when I’m truly inspired, and in 2024 I’ll pick up the social media pace again.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I’ll tell you about how I got into photography.

I had moved to DC to manage a salon. It was pretty stressful and I was young and didn’t really know what I was doing. They should teach emotional intelligence classes to managers. Most people become managers as an ego thing, and I was one of them. The stress grew from having a difficult time trying to find new hires (DC is very small and requires its own hair license), and the company was going through leadership changes at the same time. My district leader was out for a surgery, and they fired him during his recovery and hired somebody who had no prior experience in the hair world. The company’s owner hired this person because she was the sister of a former employee who had gotten famous on a reality show. She knew nothing. So the stress in this situation was BIG.

I had always found an outlet and happiness in being creative, so I turned back to this to combat the stressful situation at work. This was in the MySpace days, so I bought a Canon Rebel DSLR camera and started taking pics of myself to update my profile and make an ex-partner jealous LOL. My friends started asking me to take their pics as well. My best friend at the time was in art school, so he loaded Photoshop on my computer and I went on YouTube and learned how to edit. I started creating little sets and coming up with concepts and teaching myself about lighting. My mom used to say I was wasting my time and asking why I was doing this for free and never liked anything I was doing. I saw this as my schooling and ignored her. I told her one day I’d be able to use this. Years later, I’m the creative director at the salon I work for, Spa on the Ave, and I get to create ads and come up with content. Now my photography helps me in a big way because we live in a social media world. Images and videos are everywhere. Big, overpriced shoots aren’t done or are unattainable for smaller companies. At the end of the day, from a big shoot, you are only using a handful of images. With social media running at warp speed to match people’s attention spans, it makes more sense to have somebody in house that can turn out fast concepts or refine posts. So my hobby turned into a job. To maintain balance, I only do photography projects that interest me so I don’t burn out and hate it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @thathairstylist_Jimy

Image Credits
All images were taken by me.