Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

After 45 Years Behind the Chair, “The Hairapist of Human Reinvention” Releases Lipstick, Grace & Grit

Beauty veteran, breast cancer survivor, and single-mother-turned-entrepreneur Deena Von Yokes turns four decades of salon-chair wisdom into an honest, funny, deeply human guide for women ready to come home to themselves.

RANCHO SANTA FE, Calif. – September 1, 2026 – Deena Von Yokes has spent more than forty-five years listening to women. Now she has written the book all those conversations were always leading to. Lipstick, Grace & Grit: A Woman’s Guide to Reinvention, Confidence & Living Beautifully (Von Savvy Ascend) is available August 31, 2026 on Amazon and VonSavvyAscend.com.

For decades, women lowered themselves into Von Yokes’s salon chair believing they had come in for their hair. They left having found something else entirely. “The salon chair was never where I changed hair,” Von Yokes says. “It was where I witnessed humanity, one woman at a time.” Out of tens of thousands of those conversations came the single conviction that anchors her book: a woman’s outer transformation can become the doorway to her inner reinvention.

Lipstick, Grace & Grit is written for the woman who catches her own eyes in the mirror and wonders, “What happened to me?” After divorce, after a diagnosis, after the last child pulls out of the driveway, after retirement, after loss. To her, Von Yokes offers not a formula but a companion. “You don’t need to become someone else,” she writes. “You need to remember the woman you’ve always been.”

Von Yokes writes from a life that earned every page. Raised on food stamps and hand-me-downs, she opened her first salon at twenty-one, raised three sons largely on her own, survived breast cancer, and rebuilt her life more than once. “My degree doesn’t hang on a wall,” she says. “I earned it in the salon chair, one real human story at a time.” She calls it her Hairapist Credential.

The book weaves memoir and guidance across twenty-nine short chapters and four parts, moving from hardship toward hope, and closes each chapter with a reflection and one small, doable action so readers can carry it into their own lives. It is, by turns, tender, laugh-out-loud funny (yes, there is a chorus line of women dancing around the salon in foils), and unflinching about the hard seasons. But it always lands in the same place. “It is not too late,” Von Yokes says. “You haven’t missed your life. You’re standing right in the middle of it.”

###

@VonSavvyAscend