His Own Style

Darrius Peace didn’t always plan on becoming a hairstylist. More than 25 years ago, when he was a college student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he wanted to be a Spanish teacher. But Peace had a problem: No one on campus could braid his hair.

So he decided to learn how to do it himself. 

“This was in the ’90s, so there was no YouTube,” Peace told Your Hot Job. “There was no online resource that could help me learn how to do it. And so that’s when I just took matters into my own hands and practiced braiding my hair. It was months and months of trial and error sessions, and then eventually I got it.”

Soon other students started asking him where he got his hair braided. “I would always say, ‘I’m doing my own hair,’” he says. “And they’d ask, ‘Well, will you do my hair?’”

As it turns out, there was a barber-and-styling school right across the street from his dorm. Peace signed up. Today, he owns a salon in Birmingham called Hayah Beauty.

Originally from Mobile, Alabama, Peace is known for working with all hair types: straight, curly, coiled, wavy. That skill, he says, wasn’t something he learned in school. He had to teach himself.

“I had no idea that I was creating a method or an approach to styling hair,” Peace explains. “I was just creating a means to an end, which was, I wanted to be able to braid my hair. I wanted to be able to look good and feel confident wearing the hair that I was born with.” 

“When I integrated that into what I formally learned in beauty school,” he says—“how to straighten hair, how to cut hair, how to color hair, how to chemically treat hair in different ways, I was able to really marry those techniques to create what I call the Darrius Peace method and approach to styling textured hair.”

Making sure his clients walk out of his salon feeling proud of their locks gives Peace a lot of satisfaction. “You’re doing everything that you can to help that person have a good feeling and good thoughts about themself,” he says.

Along with running his salon, Peace has worked as a hairstylist on movie sets. He explains that getting those jobs often depends on knowing the right people. He considers film work one of the biggest learning experiences of his career, because it’s very different from salon work. In film, television, and theater, he says, stylists have to be creative and flexible, because characters can be from any time period—past, present, or future. As Peace puts it, “Maybe they have to look like they were born in 1791 or like they were born in 2091.”

Another challenge on a film or TV set is keeping things consistent. Since filming can take months, the hairstylist has to make sure a character’s hair, whether it’s real or a wig, looks exactly the same every time—same style, same color—no matter when the scene is filmed. 

“You may be working on that same exact hairstyle for six months, depending on what the script is or how long the project is going,” Peace says. “And so the difficult thing is making sure that you maintain and preserve a certain continuity with that look.”

Just like in his college days, when he taught himself to braid his own hair, Peace continues to rise to challenges. And he’s still turning heads in the process.