By Kilian Melloy

TV personality and world-renowned celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton was once a gifted, but virtually unknown, hairstylist from Leicester, England, looking to find his place in the world. Living a heteronormative life until his mid 20s, with a longtime partner and two children, Appleton’s gifts as a stylist got him more and more notice — but then, as he relates in his new book YOUR ROOTS DON’T DEFINE YOU: Transform Your Life. Create Your Comeback, he started to encounter things that might have held him back, including his own doubts about what he could do, where he go, and what he deserved in life.

Needless to say, all of that has changed. Appleton has become an absolute force in the world of beauty, a world-class stylist working with the crème de la crème of the celebrity milieu, including icons like Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and Ariana Grande. Appleton is openly gay, unafraid to be uniquely fabulous, and gifted at allowing those in his chair to see their own potential… and to take permission to pursue all that they can be.

Written with humor, profound honesty, and acute emotional intelligence, YOUR ROOTS DON’T DEFINE YOU is a rare find in the ever-burgeoning advice genre. Reaching into chapters of his own life to illustrate his message, Appleton clarifies how the past can crush a person’s spirit, but it remains possible to choose something else.

Chris Appleton graciously took the time to talk about the insights he’s gleaned from decades of cutting, shaping, and styling — and the lessons he’s distilled from the work he’s done on what it means to be your best inside and out.

Kilian Melloy: The two most powerful sentences in the book might be these: “Change isn’t just about becoming someone new. It’s about finding your way back to who you were always meant to be.” Could you talk about how you came to that thought, and what it’s meant to you?

Chris Appleton: A lot of the time we start off with reinvention or change thinking we have to abandon our past selves ourselves to be a better person. I think the secret is: It’s all part of you. If I use a personal example, I abandoned myself at a young age, probably between 12 and 13 when I got a job in hair and people very quickly labeled me as being gay. This was before I even thought about sexuality. And I also was dyslexic, which was tough. It wasn’t really understood at the time, and I was told I was stupid because I didn’t learn the way everyone else learned. I abandoned a version of myself that I didn’t even go into discovering because I was told those things were bad.

It wasn’t until I was 26 and I came out [that] my whole life changed. When I moved to America I used to really struggle to go back to the UK. I remember landing in the UK and having a full panic attack. I felt like I couldn’t be there, because I couldn’t face going back to this old version of myself. I felt like this new version of myself was going to slip away and people would see the real me, and if they saw the real me, they would know I was just this guy from Leicester that had a dream of doing hair. There was a moment where I went back to a memory I had at that age, looking at what I needed to hear at that time: That everything was going to be okay.

I think that’s the message in healing, and in growth. It’s not about deleting your past, it’s about using that as leverage to evolve as a person and become whole.

Kilian Melloy: You explain in the book that our roots aren’t just socioeconomic in nature, but loaded with expectations, judgments, and assumptions that have been imposed on us.

Chris Appleton: Yeah, totally. We don’t realize some of the things that happened to us as kids make us the person that we are now today as adults — the way we dress, the way we speak, the relationships we go into, the jobs we pick. It’s all from what we’re told is right, what we’re told is wrong. We carry that into our life.

You can make a transformation at any stage of your life. I’m not talking about just the external part; a lot of it is the internal beliefs we’ve been programmed to believe, and realizing that you can keep them, but you can move on from them. It’s about knowing that there are more options out there and giving people the empowerment to [choose those options].

Kilian Melloy: You provide various exercises in the book that people can use to develop that empowerment. Did you research this quite a lot, or does it come from so many years of being in the salon, hearing people pour out their most intimate selves to you?

Chris Appleton: A lot of it was just from experience. I realized a lot of people, when they sat in the chair, had this hate in their head, this voice of, “I’m looking so tired. Oh my God, these gray hairs…” They pick themselves apart. I’ve seen the same dynamic throughout my years of working with general public in a salon, or working with a model of Fashion Week, or a cancer patient that lost their hair and wanted a wig. I wanted to put together everything that I’ve learned into why we do that, where it comes from, and how to get to a better place from that.

Kilian Melloy: You’ve helped to define what beauty is today. How did that influence what you’ve written in this book?

Chris Appleton: I think the influence I’ve had has been visual, and I think if you look at social media you get this polished, kind of glamorized look and feel to things. But I think it’s really about alignment — both externally and looking good, but also internally. Change really is a process of going inside and looking at these beliefs we have about ourselves and being able to help have the power to transform them and move on from a place in your life.

The book is a handbook for getting to a better place. What I wanted to do is give people the tools to be able to start with that. There are processes in the book that you can see where you’re at and where you want to get to, and how to get there. I didn’t want to come from a place of “I know everything,” because I really don’t; but I know from my experiences how I’ve done it, how some of the influential people and celebrities around me have done it. I wanted people to have access to that and make it feel a bit more human and a bit more relatable… more like people can have a piece of that.

View this post on Instagram

Kilian Melloy: You talk the “revenge haircut,” the salon equivalent of a revenge dress after a breakup. I love that! Have you done many of those?

Chris Appleton: Oh, god, yeah. People love a revenge haircut. It’s the ultimate kind of payback. But it really is about people wanting to heal overnight because they’re sick of what they see in the mirror. Your image is an identity. I saw it with cancer patients. When these strong, confident women lost their hair, they were like rabbits in headlights. They were afraid, because when they saw themselves in the mirror, they didn’t recognize themselves. So, I think the whole breakup situation is a time where people want to transform and not see that person that’s in pain anymore. Hair will hold memories of that relationship, of how you wore it, and they want to see something different. They want to know they’ve moved on. They’re literally cutting away the pain.

The revenge haircut is absolutely a real thing, and it’s always something I approach with caution because [while] change is great, we want to make sure it’s the right change and you’re not doing it out of self-destruct mode or something irrational that you’re going to regret later. It’s always a conversation, and it’s a fun one of making sure it’s change for the right reason.

This interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.

YOUR ROOTS DON’T DEFINE YOU: Transform Your Life. Create Your Comeback is available at bookstores and through retail web outlets. For more information, visit the book’s website.