Before Extensions Plus became one of the most recognized and trusted names in the hair extension industry, before the innovation, the handcrafted hair, the education, and the decades of influence… there was simply a little girl growing up in a beauty salon in Southern California.
Born in October of 1951, Helene spent nearly her entire life within just a few miles of where she grew up. California was home in every sense of the word. Her family eventually settled in the San Fernando Valley, where she lived in the same house until she married at nineteen. Even now, decades later, she’s never strayed far from those roots where she was raised.
The beauty industry wasn’t something she discovered later in her life. It surrounded her from the very beginning.
Her parents owned a salon called Woodman Square Hair Fashion over on Woodman Ave. Her mother worked as the receptionist there, while her father styled hair behind the chair. Long before Helene understood business or branding or entrepreneurship, she understood the rhythm of salon life — the sound of women laughing under hood dryers, the scent of hairspray hanging in the air, the endless shuffle of appointments on a busy Saturday morning.
For Helene, the salon never felt like work. It felt like home.
As a child, while other kids were outside playing, she was often tucked into corners of the shop washing hairpieces, brushing out wiglets, and learning how transformation could completely change the way a woman carried herself. By the time she was twelve or thirteen years old, she was already styling hairpieces for salon clients. She loved every part of it — washing the hair, conditioning it, coloring it, drying it, and bringing it to life in her hands.
Even now, she still talks about hair with the kind of affection most people reserve for art.
“It has always just relaxed me,” she says.
That love for beauty showed up early and unapologetically. Long before oversized glam became mainstream, Helene was already layering hairpieces, wearing dramatic lashes, and creating her own version of beauty trends before trends really existed. At one point, she owned nearly thirty-five hairpieces herself and regularly wore multiple at once for extra fullness and glamour.
But underneath the beauty was something even more defining: an instinct to create.
As a little girl, Helene was constantly inventing ways to make things and sell them. She squeezed lemons from her family’s trees, froze the juice into homemade popsicles in little white Dixie cups, and sold them to neighbors. She made puppets and hosted puppet shows. She designed jewelry and sold pieces through her parents salon. Creativity and entrepreneurship were never separate parts of her personality — they naturally existed together.
By seventeen, she had graduated high school early and enrolled in beauty school at the coaxing of her parents. Though truthfully, without realizing it, she had been preparing for the industry her entire life.
She quickly became known for her speed and work ethic once she entered salon life professionally. Years later, she could average seventeen clients in a single twelve-hour Saturday shift, beginning at six in the morning and moving through shampoo sets in as little as fifteen minutes each.
She worked hard because that was simply how she was raised.
Her childhood wasn’t glamorous in the traditional sense. For much of her early life, the family lived lower middle class, finding greater stability only after her parents opened their salon. Her mother had worked as a hairdresser in the 1940s before stepping away from the profession to raise her children and care for their home. Years later, she returned to the beauty industry but this time as the receptionist at the family salon, while Helene’s father worked behind the chair.
More than anything, though, Helene remembers her mother for who she was. Kind, protective, nurturing, and steady, she became one of the most influential figures in Helene’s life. She was the quiet force that held everything together—the person who created stability, offered comfort, and made home feel safe no matter what was happening around them.
The world Helene grew up in also shaped her profoundly. She came of age during an America marked by cultural change, war, and shifting traditions. She vividly remembers the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 and how deeply it shook her as a young girl. During the Vietnam War, she volunteered with the USO as a teenager, writing letters to soldiers while watching classmates leave for war and never return home.
There was resilience built into her generation.
She also grew up surrounded by diversity in Southern California and naturally connected with the strong Mexican culture around her. Language, customs, community — it all came easily to her. She absorbed cultures naturally, something that would later become unexpectedly important as her career expanded internationally and broke down cultural walls.
By the early 1970s, Helene officially became a licensed hairstylist, a license she still maintains to this day. The beauty industry at the time looked dramatically different than it does now. Hair was conservative. Salons revolved around shampoo sets, cuts, basic color, and the occasional perm. Education was limited, and most stylists learned simply by doing.
“There wasn’t really training,” she recalls. “You learned on the job.”
Still, even then, Helene wanted more for her clients.
More volume.
More glamour.
More transformation.
More options.
She was fascinated by the possibility of giving women the kind of hair they dreamed about but couldn’t naturally achieve.
Then one ordinary moment quietly changed the trajectory of her life.
One afternoon in 1987, while getting her nails done one day, she overheard someone talking about hair extensions. Intrigued, she inquired more and was directed to a shop named Tadashi in Calabasas, ran by a man named Glenn Hamanaka, who was teaching extension techniques. The moment she walked into that class and saw hair being woven onto a loom, and something clicked instantly.
She was captivated.
Not casually interested.
Completely obsessed.
She began weaving hair herself, on a loom, under Hamanaka's tutorage, eventually creating wefts not only for Tadashi, but for other salons as well. Almost immediately, she recognized the potential. Stylists wanted these products. Women wanted transformation. The industry was missing something.
"...at the time I thought it would just be a hobby. But then people began to pay me for it. And I just couldn't believe people would pay me to do this!"
But there was one major issue she couldn’t ignore.
The hair itself wasn’t good enough.
At the time, most available hair was poor quality and inconsistent. Helene could create beautiful wefts, but if the hair failed, the entire experience failed with it. Clients returned needing repairs or replacements, and she hated charging women for re-dos caused by poor-quality hair she didn’t believe in.
And then came another frustration — suppliers often refused to work directly with her.
“Have your husband call us,” they would say.
The business world, especially manufacturing and sourcing, was heavily male-dominated even in the 80s. But instead of discouraging her, the resistance sharpened her determination.
Because somewhere between the little girl styling wiglets in her parents’ salon, the teenager fascinated by glamour, and the young stylist frustrated by the industry’s limitations, the foundation for Extensions Plus had already begun to take shape.
Helene Stahl wasn’t just building hair extensions.
She was beginning to build an entirely new standard.
