Photographer Jasmine Ross discusses ‘Beauty Plus’, her evolving exploration of Black-owned beauty supply stores as living archives of care, entrepreneurship, memory, and cultural inheritance.
21 July 2026
For Jasmine Ross, ‘Beauty Plus’ is not simply a photographic record of a beloved Black-owned beauty supply store at the end of its 31-year history. It is an ongoing act of preservation that asks how communities remember, sustain, and celebrate the spaces that shape everyday life. Through large-format photography and close collaboration with the store’s owners and staff, Ross transforms an ordinary site of commerce into a profound reflection on Black cultural memory, intergenerational legacy, and the politics of visibility. In this conversation, she reflects on the importance of documenting living histories, the complexities of Black entrepreneurship, and why archives are ultimately built through relationships as much as through objects.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Beauty Plus’ begins with the closure of a beloved Black-owned beauty supply store, but the project looks beyond loss. How did you create an archive that remains active and future-facing?
Jasmine Ross: While ‘Beauty Plus’ reflects on the closure of a 31-year-old Black-owned beauty supply store, it was always about ensuring its owners received their flowers within their lifetime. I’m grateful to share that this work has since evolved into the first chapter of my ongoing series, Changing Hands, a long-term project that follows Black-owned businesses as they navigate sale, succession, closure, and generational transition. As the Baby Boomer generation, who started businesses at a higher rate than any generation before them, ages and enters retirement, many owners are being confronted with difficult decisions about the future of the institutions they built. In turn, communities are left to grapple with what happens when the third spaces and cultural time capsules that once felt like home begin to disappear or transform. The work remains active and future-facing because these stories are still unfolding in real time, asking not only what is lost when ownership changes, but what can still be preserved through collective care. I also believe the archive extends beyond the photographs themselves and into the ways the work continues to bring people together. During the run of the show at MoAD, the Salon Day public program welcomed more than 200 visitors for a conversation with leaders across the beauty industry, alongside shade-matching demonstrations by e.l.f. Cosmetics makeup artists. Through the generous support of CREDO Beauty, PATTERN Beauty, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Rare Beauty, and other partners, every participant also received a complimentary beauty bag, helping transform the museum into a space of care, celebration, and community exchange. The fact that so many organisations chose to contribute their time and resources without expecting anything in return speaks to a shared belief in the importance of preserving these stories. In that sense, ‘Beauty Plus’ is not simply documenting community but a mechanism to continue to create it.
The store emerges as a space of care, exchange, and cultural continuity. What does it reveal about forms of community infrastructure often overlooked in mainstream histories?
‘Beauty Plus’ reveals the nuances of these everyday third spaces as more than just places of commerce but as valid and necessary cultural keepers and community builders. I think what’s so beautiful about the Black community is a generally instilled ideal of entrepreneurship and collective care, where these Black-owned businesses have bridged these values together to fill roles that extend beyond the services they provide, becoming institutions that restore and push forward the social fabric of the communities they uphold. Because of their “everydayness”, it’s easy to overlook their importance as necessary public goods, but the routine interactions and sustained relationships housed and developed in these mom-and-pop businesses are what reveal their remarkable nature.
You focus on details such as chipped mannequins, fading photographs, and empty hangers. What drew you to these objects as carriers of memory?
I was drawn to these objects as clear markers of the passage of time. The deteriorating and discoloured paint skins of the mannequins, the yellowed photos, and the undressed hangers all reveal signs of wear and tear that this space had undergone as quiet witnesses to the comings and goings of ‘Beauty Plus’. What I love most is that they were never replaced. Many of the mannequins had been with the owners since their opening, where care was reflected not because these items were kept in their best condition, but because they had endured alongside them. Lisa Harrell, a long-time employee of ‘Beauty Plus’, actually hand-adorned all the tops on the mannequins with decoupage, even painting on their own lipstick. Through these gestures, Lisa transformed these mannequins into more authentic representations of Black women deserving of care and adornment, mirroring the changing fashions, expressions, and hairstyles of Black womanhood over the past 30 years. Here is what Melvenia Hylton, the owner, had to say about the wig heads:
“Well, you see, one thing about Lisa is she is very, very talented… The wig heads that came in were just plain Black wig heads. Lisa was the one that put lipstick on ‘em, none of them came that way… The wig heads that we had, ya know, we had some that had diamonds on them, we had some in different colours, because she is so gifted and so crafty, and so just to have them regular, like a Black wig head, she would always do something to create another type of look for them… We needed to make them represent us, people of color, Beauty Plus.” – Melvenia Hylton.
You photographed ‘Beauty Plus’ with a 4×5 large-format camera. How did this slow process shape your engagement with histories at risk of disappearing?
This process really pushes me to sit with the communities I’m photographing and understand their stories beyond the surface level. With my large format camera, each shot takes between 20-30 minutes to set up properly – from going under the dark cloth to look at the upside down and inverted image on the ground glass, focusing the image, and manually metering the light to know how much to adjust the aperture – I use this time to really get to know the people I am photographing and the things they hold close to them, allowing me to get a fuller picture of what these spaces really embodied.
The work presents beauty supply stores as sites of both empowerment and commodification. How do you navigate this tension, and why was it important to leave it unresolved?
I think this aspect of the work is beautifully reflected through “Motions” (2025). Decades ago, Mel covered the shop’s worn walls with beauty brand advertisements featuring R&B figures like B2K, turning what was broken into something affirming and beautiful. Brands like Motions, Harlem 125, and Posner, though not Black-owned, carved space in a market that had long excluded Black women, offering products that shaped evolving rituals of care and self-expression. At the same time, their presence underscores the complicated economics of Black beauty, where cultural identity is celebrated but often monetised by those outside the community. I wasn’t interested in resolving that contradiction because it isn’t one with a simple answer. The history of Black beauty is inseparable from histories of exclusion, assimilation, entrepreneurship, and resilience. Beauty supply stores have long existed within those tensions. While they might be spaces of affirmation for people to experiment with their identity, they also operate within industries shaped by Eurocentric beauty standards and unequal ownership. My role isn’t to prescribe how audiences should feel about those contradictions, but to document them honestly, where I hope the work creates space for viewers to sit with the complexity of this history that still remains unresolved.
In ‘Beauty Plus’, Mel becomes both an individual and a custodian of collective memory. How did your relationship with her evolve during the project?
My relationship with Mel evolved drastically from the first moment I photographed her to today, where she and her husband, Rudy, now consider themselves my third set of grandparents. The first and, in many ways, grounding image of Beauty Plus is “How We See You”, a black-and-white diptych of Mel cleaning the storefront windows of her shop. I took these images months before I knew Mel, and months before she knew her store was going to close, although I’d frequented ‘Beauty Plus’ for my hair care needs and photography props many times while I was in college. Seeing her framed by the mannequins later reflected symbols of her life’s work, with the light gleaming across her face, against my normal consent-based practice, I hastily snapped 3 photographs and fled out of fear she would disapprove. It wasn’t until months later, when my friend shared they were closing, that I built up the courage to return and give her one of the images as a thank you for creating a space where I felt safe enough to experiment with my own identity and be seen through the love of the neighbourhood aunties. That moment was the beginning of our collaborative relationship and my 2.5-month documentation of the store’s final days. Even now, I still call Mel and Rudy to update them on my whereabouts and make sure they’re adjusting to retirement well. When I made silk scarves, tote bags, and sticker sheets, I immediately sent them to Mel and the other girls, Emma and Lisa, who worked there, and Mel and Rudy just sent me a birthday card last month. I think that’s the most beautiful gift that I got from ‘Beauty Plus’ was this evolved sense of fictive kin and a greater understanding of my larger purpose as a storyteller.
‘Beauty Plus’ treats the beauty supply store as an archive. What can museums and art institutions learn from spaces like this about preserving cultural memory?
I think what museums and art institutions can gain from spaces like this is adopting a model of preservation that isn’t so centred on collecting objects but on preserving relationships. Third spaces like beauty supply stores, churches, and neighbourhood restaurants are all living archives where knowledge is passed down through everyday ritual and collective care. Instead of waiting for them to become history, these arts institutions can invest in these spaces today through things like mutually beneficial programming, making preservation not just about protecting the past, but actively sustaining the communities generating our cultural inheritance.
‘Beauty Plus’ highlights the significance of ordinary spaces and the communities that sustain them. What do you hope audiences reconsider about value, visibility, and cultural inheritance through this work?
I hope audiences start to rethink what we deem worthy of preservation, and realise the importance of pouring into these cultural institutions while their owners are still living to see the benefits of their labour, instead of waiting for them to become a memory of the past.
This exhibition was on view at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco from 18 March until 31 May 2026.
