For a living, Hollister resident Rose Ortiz helps beautify
people with a little hair and make-up – even the deceased.
For a living, Hollister resident Rose Ortiz helps beautify people with a little hair and make-up – even the deceased.
When she’s not working in her salon, Ortiz works on-call for the two funeral parlors in town, making sure the deceased look their best with a great hair style and complimenting eye shadow and lipstick.
“It makes me feel good that I’m helping them look good,” Ortiz said. “That way their families get to view them the way they remember them.”
Ortiz’s career of working with the dead began in 2001, when friend and neighbor John Sander called her in a panic.
“He had a woman who needed her hair done, and his wife was out of town,” she said. “So I told him I would come over and help.”
After spending the day working on the woman, Ortiz went home worried she didn’t do the woman’s hair correctly, or that the make-up was the wrong shades. Concerned about her work, she went to her mother’s house and asked her if she knew the woman. Her mother said she did and comforted Ortiz by telling her she styled the woman’s hair the same way she wore it in life.
Little did Ortiz know at the time, her second client would be her own mother.
“About two months later my mom died, and I knew how she looked so I decided to help,” she said. “It was the weirdest thing to see my mom lying there, looking like she was sleeping.”
After the passing of her mom, whose hair she used to style when she was alive, Ortiz started getting used to working with the dead, and was once again faced with styling another family member. Just a few short months after her mother died, her son-in-law’s mother passed away. Because of the way she died, Ortiz said, her body was in bad shape, and it was a lot of work to make her look as beautiful as she did while she was alive.
“She was a beautiful woman, and always wore a lot of make-up,” she said. “When John came in and saw her done, he was like ‘Oh my god, you made her look so good.'”
While she’s in the lab working, Ortiz said, she can tell when someone wants her there and when they don’t.
“You can feel things when you’re with the person, and she (son-in-law’s mother) didn’t want me there,” she said.
Another client did, however.
“When you’re in the lab, all you can smell is chemicals, and when I was finished doing this one woman’s hair, I’ll never forget it, the room started to smell like perfume,” she said. “John came in and smelled it too, and asked me if I had sprayed some on her. I told him no and he said ‘Ah, you made her happy, look at how beautiful you did her hair.'”
