America cheered Alysa Liu’s gold medal winning performance in Milan last week—but perhaps no American more than Kelsey Miller. The St. Louis-based stylist spent five hours perfecting Liu’s halo hair at her downtown salon on Jan. 8. Now that Liu has gone gold, the whole world has been calling, including Allure, Cosmopolitan, and even Vogue.
“It’s pretty incredible,” says Miller. “It’s, like, all the magazines I’ve looked at since I was a little girl. To see my name in them is an amazing feeling.”
The 39-year-old Soulard resident says the booking came about through a personal connection: A client was having lunch with someone involved with the U.S. Olympic trials in St. Louis when that person mentioned that a figure skater needed help fine-tuning hair she’d done on her own. “And she’s like, ‘Well, my girl’s right down the street. You want me to give her a call?’” It was only after Miller agreed to fit in the last-minute booking that she learned the athlete needing a little help was Liu—and that far from being a little touchup, the work involved bleaching and toning bright platinum stripes into Liu’s dark locks. Not a normal request, but for Miller, who specializes in dimensional color, nothing that freaked her out, either. Nor did the fact that the eye-catching look she achieved would soon be on TVs and smartphones across the U.S…