Jasmine Ross’s Beauty Plus: The Beauty Supply as Archive

The beauty supply store is its own kind of institution. It holds a familiar, almost atmospheric nostalgia that stays with you long after you’ve stepped outside. It’s routine, something many of us have done for so long it feels automatic…but automatic doesn’t mean empty. The feeling it leaves is recognisable: it reads like home.

We move through the aisles with ease, knowing it’s a business, yes, but also a tradition. For many of us, it’s one of the first places we go to learn how to take care of ourselves, how to style ourselves, how to show up in the world. It’s a hyper-local form of memory and inheritance. And crucially, it’s one of the few commercial spaces where Black consumers don’t need to explain a thing. The knowledge is assumed, references shared, and, importantly, the stakes are understood. Entering the store becomes an early rite; an unspoken introduction to what being you actually entails.

Jasmine Ross understands this.

More importantly, she understands its stakes.

Her debut solo exhibition, Beauty Plus, opened at Sunset House Los Angeles and drew artists, collectors, and the usual cultural omnivores. But strip away the event’s sheen [the performances, the brand partners, the crowd] and what remains is a body of work that insists the beauty supply store is not a footnote in Black culture. It’s a highly acclaimed, heavily referenced chapter.

Ross photographs it as such.

Her subject is a black-owned beauty supply in New Haven that served its community for over three decades. It’s not just conceptual. It’s a real place, now gone, preserved in large-format images that depict fluorescent light and wire shelving with archival tenderness.

Ross’s approach is steady and attentive.

She shoots the store as a site of sanctuary that still reflects the fragility of Black entrepreneurship; a room of infinite possibility where identity is tried on, layered, undone, and rebuilt; a business that doubles as an informal community center.

The images are shot with care and felt through memory, they ask the viewer to consider a truth many of us already know; the beauty supply is one of the last reliable mirrors in Black life. It reflects us back to ourselves unapologetically.

Ross is Yale-trained, which matters only because she doesn’t weaponise that pedigree. Her mission is disarmingly clear: make work that people can walk into without feeling stupid or excluded. At the opening, one attendee admitted it was their first art show ever, and that Ross’s talk made it feel possible to belong in the space. That feels like the most radical part of this exhibition. Not its academic scaffolding, but the willingness to meet the audience where they are.

If museums were truly doing their job, the beauty supply would already be canon. It’s where Black girls study themselves before they ever understand the politics of their reflection. What Ross understands, and what the exhibition makes clear, is that beauty supply stores often sit at the center of community life while also existing under constant pressure. Black-owned shops in particular face challenges: competition, rising rents, limited support, gentrification. The New Haven store she documents functioned as a hub for decades…and then it was gone.

Ross’s work doesn’t romanticise this; it contextualises it.

She treats the space as a cultural search engine, mapping its curves and textures with the acclaim of an architectural ruin or a historic storefront. But unlike ruins, often fetishised, the beauty supply is still breathing, still essential, still shaping how we show up in the world.

Beauty Plus is her first solo exhibition, but the aim is clear. She treats the beauty supply not as an anecdote of Black life but as a cultural site that deserves to be archived.

Her photography slows the space down.

It lets the viewer notice what we often rush past.

Not just for nostalgia’s sake, but because without documentation, these spaces [and the histories attached to them] become easier to erase.

The opening featured performances by Marc E. Bassy, DJ sets from P-Lo + Aux Cord, and support from ILIA, PATTERN Beauty, Sweet July, and local Black-owned businesses, grounding the show in the mix of art, community, and contemporary Black culture that shapes Ross’s practice.

Here, Jasmine Ross achieves something both intimate and political, without stating the politics outright [the work handles that]. It reminds us that the beauty supply is one of the few places where Black aesthetic labour and Black cultural desire meet on equal footing. It reminds us that these stores carry far more than hair products, or lipglosses; they carry the story of what we build for ourselves when mainstream institutions refuse to.

Those stories deserve permanence too.

Beauty Plus is on view by appointment through November 15.

You might walk in thinking about hair, but you’ll leave thinking about care, and the spaces we lose when we assume they’ll always be there.