Beauty Salon

Standout Features:

• A color palette that contrasts warmth with underlying emptiness
• Use of negative space to evoke silence and absence
• Typography that blends elegance with subtle unease

At first glance, Beauty Salon looks almost inviting. Two candy-pink salon chairs sit neatly side by side, framed by the sterile white of the background. The color palette is gentle, the setting familiar.

You might expect a lighthearted story of self-care, community, and small joys. Instead, the design lulls you into a false sense of comfort, mirroring the book’s deeper, far more tragic narrative about the devastation of HIV/AIDS. The more you look, the more the cover unsettles. The salon is empty. The chairs, though placed together, feel disconnected. The white space around them is cold, stark, more like a waiting room than a place of transformation. The hand-drawn quality of the image adds to the fragility of it all — like something fading, already halfway to being forgotten.

Even the title plays its part. Written in soft, cursive blue, it carries the elegance of a salon sign, yet something feels slightly off. It’s too delicate, too ornamental for the weight of the story behind it. This is a book cover that doesn’t reveal its sorrow outright — it lingers, creeping in at the edges, making you feel it’s quiet absence before you even know what’s missing.