When growing up, I was surrounded by beauty, fashion and design. My mother was a professional model, my father an interior decorator who had attended but never graduated beauty school, and my grandfather a barber. By the time I was six years old, my favorite pastime had become watching my mother get ready for the day – applying makeup, doing her hair, and putting on beautiful clothes. The transformation seemed magical to me. While other girls my age were playing with dolls, I was fascinated with things like hair curlers. My aunt who has had chronic back problems for most of her life, likes to retell how I used to insist, “Why don’t you let me curl your hair, it will make you feel better.”

While a fabulous hairstyle may not be the panacea that I made it out to be, the correlation that I so naturally saw between how one looks and feels was not at all juvenile. After all, I witnessed nearly every day how my mother became a different person after putting herself together – not only in how she looked but also in the way she carried herself. She went from a tired housewife to a glamour queen in the hour or so that it took her to leisurely style her hair, apply makeup, and put on beautiful clothes.

One could say I was bread for this line of work. While nearly every female relative and close family friend succumbed to my hair curlers, my parents made sure that the baby beautician was not neglected either. At age three I had fashionable dresses, hats, purses, even jewelry. I even had my own little wine glass at the dinner table (with real wine in it), and absolutely refused to sit at the “kids table” throughout my childhood. It is thus not surprising that as a child I was not only a diva in the making, but one who related to adults much more than to other children. I wanted to do all of the things that adults do, and by age seven I was also doing much of what the adults did not want to do – cooking, baking, cleaning, and consoling my mother during her bouts with depression. I also began painting and sewing at a very young age – something that helped me to hone my eye as a colorist and cut straight lines as a hair cutter later in my life, which turned out to be at around age ten. It was then that my mother bestowed me with a hair color brush and a mixing bowl, and directed me to her ever-budding roots. My father gifted me a pair of my grandfather’s barber shears, fully exposing their plan for the diva they so carefully crafted – they were raising a personal family beautician. Which can be a lot of work when one’s extended Italian family consists of well over a hundred relatives – most of who lived within a several mile radius of us.

After my father gave me a few lessons on cutting hair based on what he could remember from his own days in beauty school (which was not much since he attended it before being drafted into the armed forces during WWII), I continued to do so purely on instinct and my ability to cut a straight line. A common phrase when we were being invited to a relative’s home, had soon become, “Make sure Eva brings her scissors!” This resulted in several traumatic experiences as I got to see my family like never before – everything from exposed comb-overs to seeing my grandmother for the first time with her hair down. Grandma Scrivo always wore her hair up in a bun. One time, when I came over for dinner with my parents and sister, scissors in my bag, we found her sitting in a hair cutting cape and facing away from the door. Her grey hair hung down to her waist, and being eleven, I thought she was a ghost! It was a traumatic experience at the time, and all she said was, “Honey, could you give me a bit of a trim?”

By the time I entered beauty school at seventeen, I had already been doing hair for about seven years. I also continued to do both cut and color, as well as makeup. In those days in Michigan people typically didn’t specialize in just one thing like many do today. Therefore, my career choice came quite naturally and I certainly never agonized as a teenager over what I wanted to do with my life. Having been in this business for so many years, I can now state other reasons that I likely could not have articulated at seventeen: I perform a craft that I love, creating an ever-present art; I make people happy on a daily basis; I make them feel more beautiful, sexy, and confident; I get to meet and bond with many wonderful individuals, some of whom have had a profound impact on my life; and for the past few years I have also been teaching numerous others how to do the same. I cannot think of a more gratifying career.

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