Elevating beauty from the inside out.

About Anna

Thirty years in Bradford. Nearly forty behind the chair.

I’ve been doing hair since I was a kid practising on my dolls.

When I finished high school I took a hairstyling course first, so I would have a way to support myself. Then I spent the next three years at Humber College studying music performance, and worked at high end salons in the GTA to get by. I came out of it with a performance diploma and two careers.

I sang on cruise ships for a few seasons. Then Scruples brought me on as an educator and platform artist, and I spent years travelling North America teaching other stylists — the kind of in-person classes people used to fly in for. I also worked for Farouk, and the hair shows that came with it.

Then Bradford

I came home to get married and have children. When we moved to Bradford I brought my clientele with me and opened my own salon.

The early days were a bit of everything. My clients helped with my kids and brought their own along while I did their hair — it worked for them and it worked for me. The business grew by word of mouth and never really stopped.

Bradford is where we chose to raise our family. Thirty years on I’m part of this community in a dozen different ways, and that is what has kept me here.

What hasn’t changed

Plenty has. Education used to mean trade shows and expensive classes — I taught a lot of them. Now it’s all online, and I’m still in it, because staying current was never optional in this job.

What hasn’t changed is the chair. I still have clients who found me at the very first salon I ever worked in, almost four decades ago. I’ve watched families grow up. People bring me their good news and their hard years, and I have never once taken that lightly.

What COVID taught me

It was the most uncertain time I have known in this job. For an industry built around people, connection, creativity and making others feel good about themselves, suddenly being told to stop was incredibly difficult.

But it gave me something I had never really had. Time to breathe. To slow down, step back, and think about where we had been and where we wanted to go. We learned, we adapted, and when we finally got back behind the chair I think a lot of us came back with a completely different perspective.

It gave me a renewed appreciation for this industry — the conversations, the creativity, the relationships, and the confidence you can give someone when they leave the chair feeling beautiful. Being a hairstylist isn’t just about hair. It’s about people, and I don’t ever want to take that for granted again.

Elevating beauty from the inside out. That is what Elevation’s has always meant.

— Anna Royce