Julie Vriesinga: The Details Are Everything

There is a quote Julie Vriesinga carries with her into every service, every competition piece, every creative project she takes on. "The difference between good and great is in the details." It is not a complicated idea. But it is one of those things that is easy to say and genuinely hard to live by when you are behind the chair every day, booked solid, and working at full speed.

Julie Vriesinga lives by it. And the work shows.

A NAHA 2026 Hairstylist of the Year finalist, Vriesinga is the Artistic Director at Salon Entrenous in London, Ontario, Canada. She has been with the same salon for 18 years, working in the industry since she was 15 years old. Twenty-two years in, she is still competing, still creating, still pushing her craft forward. The NAHA ceremony takes place May 31, 2026 in Orlando, Florida, where she will stand among the industry's best and find out if this year is her year.

Built From the Ground Up

Vriesinga grew up in a small beach community on Lake Huron and trained at a private hair school in London, Ontario before completing her apprenticeship and continuing her education with L'Oreal. She has been at Salon Entrenous for the majority of her career, building a chair and a reputation in the same place for nearly two decades. That kind of longevity in one salon is rare and it says something real about both the stylist and the environment she has built around herself.

Her competition journey started early. She entered her first competition and won Newcomer of the Year at the Mirror Awards in 2005. Rather than riding that momentum to easy early success, she spent the years that followed grinding through near-misses, making finals and falling short, building the muscle that only comes from competing seriously over time.

"I think the more important part was the work I put in the years following," she has said. "Many attempts to make finals and many losses when I did make it. These were the years of never giving up that set the stage for later successes."

That attitude, honest about struggle and committed to the long game, is not something you find in every artist. It is exactly the kind of perspective that makes a career in this industry sustainable.

The Moment That Defined Her

Every stylist has one moment they come back to as a turning point. For Vriesinga, it happened in January at a NAHA ceremony where she performed her first live show. Standing on a stage at the most prestigious hairstyling awards in North America, doing live work in front of an audience of industry peers, is about as exposed as you can get as a stylist. There is nowhere to hide. The skills either hold up or they do not.

She pulled it off. And later that same night, she won Master Hairstylist of the Year.

"It was so scary but also so rewarding pushing past that fear," she reflected afterward. The willingness to do the scary thing is a recurring theme in how she talks about her career. For someone as technically accomplished as Vriesinga, the bar she holds herself to means the risk is always real. Which is what makes the work worth doing.

What She Is Building Next

Even with NAHA finals on the horizon, Vriesinga is already thinking about what comes after. She has talked openly about wanting to expand into education work, to take what she has learned over two decades behind the chair and on the competition floor and bring it to other stylists. Stage work, brand collaborations, the kind of career extension that keeps the creative engine running while opening new doors.

It is the natural trajectory for artists who have maximized what they can build within a single salon. The craft gets bigger when you start sharing it.

For now, the focus is on Orlando and the 37th Annual North American Hairstyling Awards. Five finalists are competing for Hairstylist of the Year. All five are exceptional. But one of them has been spending 22 years making sure the details are right.

Watch for her work, follow her at @julievriesinga, and pay attention to what she brings to the NAHA stage this weekend. The details are everything. She has been proving that for a long time.