the movement.

A haircut changed everything

Elizabeth Faye was a troubled teenager. From twelve to sixteen she was sent to a different school every year and lived with a different family every year, an attempt to deal with struggles at home and severe bullying. She did drugs, rebelled and ran away. She turned her hair into a colorful “distraction” so she would have a reason to get kicked out of school. Instead, a woman handed her a business card for a hairdresser, and the mandatory color correction became the appointment that changed her life. That hairdresser fell in love with her, recognized that she needed love and mentorship, and traded free hair appointments for a report card with better grades on it. He became her first mentor, and that act of kindness carried her from twelve to sixteen.

High school dropout to hairdresser

At sixteen Elizabeth Faye walked into the salon with no report card. “I’m too stupid. I dropped out of high school.” Instead of a lecture she was offered a job, working alongside the hairdresser who first changed her life, and she became a hairdresser herself. The beauty industry became home: the place that has always made her feel heard, seen and loved.

Becomes an educator

Elizabeth Faye works in major salons from Las Vegas to Chicago, earning her way onto shows and stages along the way by assisting the people she looked up to. She loves being mentored, and makes constant learning and assisting others a value she never lets go of. She becomes a Learning Leader at Paul Mitchell the School, and education becomes an integral part of her career. Still behind the chair, she begins mentoring and giving back to others the way it was given to her.

From motherhood to entrepreneurship

Becoming a young mom changed Elizabeth, and sparked a new chapter. She wanted to build something bigger for her son and for her life, and her vision grew as her love for him grew. Between breastfeeding, clients and teaching, she started building from her phone: a beauty blog, workshops, an Etsy shop, pop-up events and a growing personal brand. Some ideas worked, plenty flopped, but the drive to create, build community and become an entrepreneur took hold.

Created her first course
Sold it on a flash drive

Elizabeth Faye takes her first real swing at building her own education while juggling clients, teaching, wedding hair and makeup, and motherhood. She trades hair services with a dear friend, a videographer, to film her first beauty course, then edits it herself on iMovie late at night, often sitting in a closet so the computer light won’t wake her sleeping son. She loads the course onto flash drives and sells them at local women’s events.

She sells a few. It pretty much flops. But the flop sparks something bigger. It is her first time creating her own curriculum, producing education and putting her ideas into the world, and it becomes the beginning of years spent building courses, curating experiences, creating events and bringing beauty professionals together.

Business takes off
Marriage falls apart

Elizabeth Faye’s education brand starts to build, by word of mouth and on Instagram. It starts with small groups in beauty schools and salons, spreads through relationships, and grows into workshops around the country. The workshops are where the Hair Love method comes to life: every one opens with journaling, an intention and a dream, then business, then hair painting. That inside-out approach is what starts changing lives.

Stylists and salon owners ask for a level two, the curriculum grows into levels, and Elizabeth Faye trains her first assistants to travel with her. Four successful years of workshops grow the community that will become Hair Love. At home, her marriage falls apart. She builds all of it while going through hell, becoming a single mother. This is where burnout starts to really settle in.

Salon owner, nationwide educator
and a divorce finalized

The workshops finally take off. Requests pour in, people love them, and Elizabeth Faye starts building her next digital program, Workshop in a Box™. After years of trying things and feeling like they were going nowhere, her influencer work starts to get recognized, much of it still done for brands for free. She opens Elizabeth Faye Salon with an established brand in town, and grows her dream team and her business online.

After a long, excruciating back and forth, her divorce is finalized. She buys her first home and starts to rebuild a life with her little boy. Single mom, breadwinner, juggling it all, she keeps pushing past the burnout while chasing a toddler.

Becomes Redken’s first global ambassador

Elizabeth Faye has been donating her time to Redken for free, showing up to their events to support them, using their product in her nationwide workshops, and influencing for the brand. She pitches a concept, takes her shot, sends it to corporate, and a few women on the inside who believe in her open the door. Elizabeth Faye becomes Redken’s first-ever global ambassador, and Redken becomes Hair Love’s first sponsor.

As a single mom, she applies for a grant and wins $10,000 from Cosmoprof, which is how she affords the deposit on her first retreat venue and a new laptop to scale her digital business. People think Hair Love is a crazy idea. She goes for it anyway, with her hair assistant, who becomes the head of events. Workshop in a Box™ officially launches, and after years of digital education flops it becomes a total hit. She starts dating Derek, who becomes her husband. Underneath all of it, the burnout turns into being physically sick and living with anxiety.

Hair Love takes off
Her health doesn’t

Hair Love Retreat launches and becomes everything Elizabeth Faye had been building toward: education, experience, connection and community in one place. The retreats take off, the community grows, and Hair Love begins changing lives. With her salon, influencer work, digital course and retreats all taking off at once, she steps away from working behind the chair and finishes her last year of workshops.

At the same time, her health starts falling apart. Chronic pain, migraines, inflammation, anxiety and mystery symptoms pile up while her family navigates its own mental health struggles. On the outside the business is growing. Behind the scenes she is struggling to keep up with the life she built.

For the first time, Elizabeth Faye begins confronting a question that will eventually change the direction of her work: What good is building the career of your dreams if you’re not well enough to live it?

Everything takes off
Everything falls apart

Hair Love explodes. Events go viral, the community grows fast, and Elizabeth Faye and her team take the mission on the road with the Hair Love RV Tour, traveling the country, teaching, connecting and bringing beauty professionals together. On the outside, everything is working. Behind the scenes, everything is getting harder.

Derek, her boyfriend and future husband, is in the middle of a serious battle with life-threatening depression, while her own health keeps deteriorating. Chronic pain, inflammation, anxiety, panic attacks and mystery symptoms become impossible to push through. For years she had been focused on building, achieving and helping everyone around her grow. Now her body is asking for something different. She publicly shares that she is sick, burned out and chronically in pain, with no answers.

2019 becomes the beginning of a new journey, focused not on building more but on understanding health, healing, the nervous system, and what it actually takes to create a life and career that can be sustained. She doesn’t know it yet, but this chapter will change everything she builds next.

The world closes
She goes deep into healing

The world shuts down while Elizabeth Faye owns a salon, coaches hairdressers and runs retreats, every business you would not want to be in. Instead of leaning back, she and her team lean in and serve the community even more, hosting digital events for tens of thousands around the world.

She is deep in a personal healing journey. Desperate to find answers for herself, she goes into training as a trauma-informed life coach, a somatic practitioner, and in frequency healing and NLP. She learns that her physical ailments are deeply connected to years of burnout, and that healing a burnout that turned into autoimmune disease, chronic pain and a hairdresser’s shoulder injury is going to be a long journey. She had never realized that her emotional and mental health could be causing physical illness, or that taking care of them mattered just as much as taking care of her body. She shares all of it publicly.

It is also the year she and Derek slowly fall back in love after a season of heartbreak, trauma and health crises, and decide to keep choosing love and healing, together.

Wellness becomes the work

What began as Elizabeth Faye’s personal healing journey starts transforming the work itself. Hair Love shifts its focus toward healing retreats, life coaching, breathwork, nervous system health, emotional well-being and personal development. Wellness goes from being something we include to the heart of everything we do.

Elizabeth Faye keeps deepening her own healing while getting engaged and beginning a new chapter personally. The retreats and programs evolve with her, becoming spaces where beauty professionals don’t just learn how to build better careers, but how to take care of the human being building them.

She has always been a speaker, but now she starts getting noticed as a motivational and inspirational one, brought into corporate settings for wellness and mental health, the people-focused work her retreats are known for. She starts bringing wellness into the workplace beyond her own brand events. People keep asking how to bring this work deeper into their company cultures, so she creates educator programs, a healing certification and high-level masterminds, coaches seven-figure business owners and educators, and consults for big companies.

Without realizing it yet, the foundation of The Vitality Project is being built.

The documentary goes live

Elizabeth Faye keeps growing the wellness work: the retreats, the certification, the masterminds, the coaching and the corporate consulting all continue at the highest level. And this is the year her documentary goes live. It goes on to win awards. Elizabeth Faye starts to be known as the girl putting wellness on the map in the beauty industry.

The TEDx talk goes viral
A healing journey turns into a love story

Her TEDx talk goes viral, and the wellness work takes off with it. Between them, Elizabeth Faye and her team are changing tens of thousands of lives. The need in the industry is huge, and they are perfectly positioned to meet it, because it is what they have already been doing in so many ways.

Schools start taking an interest. Pivot Point comes to Elizabeth Faye and asks if she can build this for the school industry. The team goes back through everything they have built, the courses, the programs, the retreats, studies schools, talks to school friends and owners, and develops the school program in full swing behind the scenes.

She is still coaching, speaking and hosting healing retreats, and it becomes clear that this project is going to be big and important. They pour everything into it.

And the healing journey that started in 2019 turns into a love story. Elizabeth Faye and Derek marry in Greece, the dream wedding, surrounded by the people who walked through it all with them.

The Vitality Project
launches in schools

Elizabeth Faye is taking off as one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the industry, and her workplace wellness work is finally making it into corporate and bigger settings beyond her own retreats and programs. Her community is leading the charge while she keeps coaching and hosting masterminds.

They believe in this mission so much that Elizabeth Faye invests her entire savings and retirement into building something that can change lives worldwide, the way her programs and retreats have for years. Behind the scenes, the team finishes developing what will become The Vitality Project.

In the fall of 2024 it launches inside some of the biggest schools in the industry, and it starts to absolutely take off and change lives.

The Vitality Project
launches in salons

The Vitality Project launches in salons, and by the end of the year with solo pros. The team dials in the exact same system with the community: gathering feedback, the features and tools people want, and the best ways to implement it with a team. Working all of that out lays the groundwork for exactly the software Vitality builds in 2026. It also launches in Europe and the UK with a beta group.

At the end of 2025, with schools doubled, Elizabeth Faye decides to pause every other offer and go all in on The Vitality Project, so it can become something that reaches the whole industry, worldwide.