Before the certifications, before the energy work, and before The Subliminal Stylist was even a name, Jessie Santiago was already doing the work. She just didn’t know it had a name yet.
“I opened my first brick and mortar, Salon Benders, in a building I had admired since 2011,” Jessie says. “It was this condemned little corner on Alamitos and Fourth that felt forgotten by the city — but not by me. I used to walk by it and imagine something beautiful happening there. And somehow, it happened.”
Salon Benders wasn’t just a salon. It was a place. A nerve center for healing disguised as a hair studio. Trauma-informed. Queer-centered. Slow. Ritual-based. It was about consent and care, just as much as cut and color. “We literally rebuilt it from the inside out,” Jessie says. “It felt like I was restoring something sacred — for the neighborhood and for myself.”
But magic is fragile in a system that doesn’t always honor its makers. After the pandemic, the building changed hands. New landlords. No shared vision. Rent hikes. Closed doors. “The building became just another investment property,” Jessie says. “I was suddenly spending more time trying to keep the space alive than doing the work I loved.”
For many, that would have been the end. For Jessie, it became the invitation.
“I was burning out,” she admits. “Clients were already coming in and treating the time like therapy, and I was holding so much emotional labor — without any tools to care for myself. Something had to change.”
And it did. She gave herself permission to pivot. Jessie began to formally train in hypnotherapy and energy work — the things she had quietly, intuitively been doing beneath the surface all along. “I closed Salon Benders not because it failed,” she says, “but because I evolved.”
Now working as The Subliminal Stylist, Jessie sees clients in a private space — or virtually — where beauty, energy work, and subconscious transformation intertwine. It’s deeply personal work. Sometimes there are scissors. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes silence. Sometimes ancestral rhythms. Always intention.
“I don’t run a shop,” she clarifies. “What I do now is about restoration — nervous system care, identity safety, creating space for people to return to themselves.”
That phrase — return to themselves — is a thread Jessie keeps weaving. “There’s this moment I look for,” she says. “The breath softens. The shoulders drop. The pacing shifts. They don’t have to say anything. I can feel it. Something opens.”
Jessie’s identity isn’t a backdrop to her work — it is the work. She’s Puerto Rican. Afro-Latina. Queer. Femme. Neurodivergent. A daughter of women who read rooms without words. A spiritual listener with scissors in one hand and lineage in the other.
Her style sessions are ritualistic. Candles. Breathwork. Trance. Grounding. And her hypnosis work is creative — sometimes leading clients to paint, draw, or collage their way through inner transformation. “It’s not about fixing anyone,” she says. “It’s about making space for people to feel real. To feel safe. To feel themselves.”
And through it all, she stays rooted in the city that helped her come into herself.
“Long Beach felt like possibility when I arrived in 2011. It still does,” Jessie says. “I didn’t want to rent a chair in someone else’s vision. I wanted to create something from the ground up. Something slow, queer, brown, intentional — like me.”
That possibility still pulses in everything she does: her private sessions, her Substack newsletter (jessiesantiago.substack.com), her Patreon community, her upcoming group workshops and bundled offerings. There are no gimmicks here. Just grounded healing — for the parts of ourselves that don’t always have a seat at the table.
Jessie’s work isn’t loud. But it lingers.
And that’s what makes it revolutionary.
To support Jessie Santiago aka The Subliminal Stylist:
thesubliminalstylist.com
Subscribe to her Substack: jessiesantiago.substack.com
Become a Patreon supporter: patreon.com/thesubliminalstylist
Instagram: @thesubliminalstylist
Images by: Photo by: Aliah Bailey & Amber Houligin
Article enhanced with AI
