For over two decades, Carol Thomas has been helping women feel beautiful inside and out—whether they’re longtime clients in her salon or women living in shelters with nowhere else to turn.

The Jamaican-born stylist, who owns Just Because Hair Salon on Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene, has built a reputation not just for expert cuts and flawless color, but for using beauty as a form of healing and empowerment.

Since 2017, Thomas has quietly led a personal initiative to serve women living in transitional housing across Brooklyn. Through monthly pop-up styling sessions and wellness days, she and her team offer free haircare, facials, and makeup services to women facing hardship, including survivors of domestic abuse, the unhoused, and mothers awaiting permanent housing.

“It wasn’t about a birthday or a holiday. These women just needed to feel good about themselves again,” Thomas said. “We wanted them to walk out feeling transformed, inside and out.”

The program started before the COVID-19 pandemic, with Thomas working with two shelters in particular — one for women who had experienced abuse and another for young mothers and their children. The stylist offered the services on Sundays, and up to 10 women at a time would receive full pampering sessions at the salon.

“That kind of work stays with you,” she said. “I’ve met women who were teachers, corporate workers, and young people who just had a stroke. You realize quickly how easily life can change for anyone.”

While the more emotionally intense sessions with abuse survivors eventually became too heavy to continue regularly, Thomas still works closely with a nearby shelter that houses mothers and children, offering seasonal styling events and self-care days.

Her commitment to giving back stems from her upbringing in Jamaica. Raised by a schoolteacher mother known to give away her children’s clothes to needy students, Thomas says she learned early the value of quiet generosity.

“My mother would take our uniforms, even our socks and underclothes, and give them to the kids who had none. And she’d say, ‘Don’t you ever tell anyone,’” Thomas recalled. “That’s how I learned what it meant to care for others.”

Beyond her shelter outreach, Thomas has led several community empowerment programs, including a six-week Prom Queen Project that helped high school girls prepare for graduation. The program included mentorship, etiquette lessons, donated dresses, and makeovers, funded partly by clients who contributed to a donation box in the salon.

She also organizes an annual community hair show, which returns this August. The event features girls as young as 3 years old walking the runway in custom styles and outfits, often for the first time.

“Some of these girls have never been treated like this,” she said. “When they get to see themselves all dressed up, it shifts something. They carry that confidence with them long after.”

Now, in addition to her salon and community projects, Thomas has launched an all-natural hair care line, ‘St. Charles Natural Hair Care’, named after her late father, combining her expertise in styling with her passion for healthy hair and wellness. It’s yet another way she’s extending her reach and impact far beyond the salon chair.

“Hair is just the beginning,” she said. “When someone sits in my chair, I want them to leave feeling whole.”

For Thomas, the mission remains simple: use her talent to uplift women in any way she can, just because it’s the right thing to do.