Your Roots Don’t Define You: Transform Your Life. Create Your Comeback.

Celebrity hairstylist Appleton debuts with a glossy yet sincere guide to personal transformation. Drawing from his years styling the likes of Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, Appleton highlights the links between external and internal change (“When you look differently, naturally, you feel different. When you feel differently, you act differently”). Minor updates like a new haircut can inspire the confidence to make changes that can snowball into major life shifts, he contends. Appleton also shares lessons on shedding one’s “roots,” or earlier and often externally imposed versions of one’s identity; using clothes and style to make a good first impression; and embracing failure as a stepping stone to growth. While Appleton sometimes stretches the haircut analogy to its breaking point, his conversational tone and enthusiasm for helping others are infectious, and his client stories yield surprisingly tender insights into the complexities of identity and self-perception. For example, after cutting a famous client’s long, sleek hair short, he realized she’d “spent all this time building this image, but somewhere along the way, it wasn’t hers anymore”; the change had “reconnected her with who she was, not the version... she thought she had to be.” It’s a refreshingly candid look at how change happens from the outside in. (Jan.)