Modern Salon
Modern Salon, styled MODERN SALON, is an American trade magazine and media brand for professional hairstylists, colourists, salon owners and beauty professionals. Founded in 1924 as Modern Beauty Shop, it celebrated its 100th birthday in 2024, making it one of the longest-running publications in the professional beauty industry. It is published within BBM Business Media — formerly Bobit Business Media — long based in Torrance, California, and since 2024 owned by media executive Colin Sutherland, who acquired the BBM beauty portfolio that year. Its website is modernsalon.com, and its content centres on hair technique, colour, trends, product innovation and the business of salon work.
Born in 1924 as Modern Beauty Shop
Modern Salon began in 1924 as Modern Beauty Shop magazine, launched during the decade when popularly priced beauty shops were spreading rapidly across the United States and professional hairdressing was becoming a mass trade. Its purpose at founding, in the magazine's own centenary account, was to serve the evolving beauty and salon industry by offering practical advice, showcasing the latest trends and providing a platform for professionals to share their expertise. Surviving issues from 1939 show how recognisable that formula already was: tutorials and step-by-step instruction on sectioning, roller placement and permanent waves, and stylists explaining how to turn a tailored daytime look into an evening style — technique education aimed squarely at working professionals, not consumers.
The 1952 Rebrand and the Vance Years
In 1952 the magazine changed its name from Modern Beauty Shop to Modern Salon. The rebranding reflected a broader scope: coverage expanded beyond hairstyling to skincare, makeup and other aspects of the salon business, and the publication became a standard resource for salon owners, stylists and beauty professionals seeking industry trends, product innovations and business strategies. In 1957 the Vance family acquired Modern Beauty Shop's successor from its founders. Vance Publishing Corp., founded by Herbert A. Vance and later chaired by his son William C. Vance, was a privately held, family-led business media company that held the title for decades; the magazine's own history notes that Chicago was Modern's base during the Vance era, and Vance marked its 75th anniversary in business media in the early 2010s with Modern Salon as one of its flagship brands across more than twenty titles in four markets.
Into the Bobit and BBM Era
Modern Salon later became part of Bobit Business Media, the Torrance, California-based business-to-business publisher, in its Beauty, Health & Wellness group alongside Salon Today, Nails and Barbering Today. Under Bobit the brand operated as a multi-platform business: print issues, modernsalon.com, newsletters, social media communities, awards programmes and live education events, supported by the publisher's audience data and marketing services. In 2024 Colin Sutherland, a Canadian media executive who had begun his career in business-to-business marketing in 1990, acquired BBM Business Media, including Modern Salon, Salon Today, Nails, Barbering Today, the Salon 200 and Modern Salon 100 awards, Modern Salon Boot Camp and Artist Connective, with a stated mission to evolve business media through storytelling, creative execution, immersive activations and education. In January 2026 Sutherland also acquired Canada's Salon Communications, publisher of Salon Magazine and the Contessa Awards, consolidating his position across North American professional beauty media.
What Modern Salon Publishes
The editorial core of Modern Salon is craft education for the working stylist. Issues and the website carry step-by-step technique features with photography that breaks down cuts, colour applications, styling and finishing; coverage of hair colour formulas, favourite products and new launches; trend collections from leading artists and salon teams; and features on texture, extensions, barbering-adjacent services and beauty disciplines beyond hair as the salon service menu has broadened. Colour has always been part of the brand's heritage: its editors have described a long tradition of collaborating with leading educators and artists in colour and other salon disciplines, and entire issues have been dedicated to cultivating colour business as a route to higher earnings.
The Modern Salon 100 and Artist Recognition
The brand's best-known franchise is the MODERN SALON 100, an annual list honouring one hundred beauty professionals chosen from across specialities, experience levels and followings, compiled with input from the whole Modern Salon team. The 2024 list, assembled for the centenary year, deliberately mixed generations: a group of honourees were cosmetology students or very recent graduates, and ten were alumni of previous lists, positioning established veterans as examples for rising talent. The programme reflects the magazine's role as a talent-spotter for the industry — editors describe being permanently on the lookout for professionals they have not yet discovered among the millions working in American salons and barbershops.
Modern Salon Boot Camp and Live Education
Modern Salon extends its education mission into live events through Modern Salon Boot Camp, a touring programme for professional beauty and barbering careers. The Atlanta edition was built around a double celebration — one hundred years of the magazine and the annual Modern Salon 100 — with industry coaches and mentors speaking on business-building topics including client acquisition, social media strategies and beauty burnout, always tied back to the attendee's own business experience. Boot Camp sits within a wider BBM events stable that includes the Data-Driven Salon Summit produced by sister brand Salon Today, and Artist Connective, the brand's creator and influencer community initiative.
Audience and Industry Role
Modern Salon addresses the professional side of beauty: licensed stylists, colourists, nail and skincare professionals in its wider group coverage, salon owners and managers, educators, students and the product companies that sell exclusively or primarily through the professional channel. Its publisher describes it as a beauty partner and industry advocate that also supplies audience data and engagement for marketing programmes. During the COVID-19 shutdowns of 2020, when salons were among the first businesses closed, Bobit's beauty brands including Modern Salon rapidly compiled reopening resources, webinars and guidance for an audience of small-business professionals — an example of the service role the magazine plays for its trade readership.
Print, Digital and a Century of Covers
The print magazine now appears in seasonal issues — recent digital editions are organised as Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter numbers — supplemented by continuous publishing at modernsalon.com and a large social following built around artist work. For its centenary in 2024 the magazine celebrated in characteristically visual fashion: a New York salon team created a decade-themed style for each era from the 1920s onward, from a 1930s bob built with a roller set and backcombing to modern looks, published through the year in print and on social media. Few trade titles get to illustrate their own archive so literally; Modern Salon could because hairstyles from every one of its hundred years remain part of the working repertoire of its readers.
Education as the Brand's Through-Line
Across a century of owners, the constant in Modern Salon's history is structured professional education. The 1939 issues of Modern Beauty Shop already mixed service tutorials with examinations of technique; the modern brand delivers the same function through step-by-step photographic features, colour formula breakdowns, educator-led collections, the Boot Camp live curriculum and the mentorship framing of the Modern Salon 100, which pairs honoured veterans with students and new graduates. Its editors have repeatedly described collaborations with leading educators and artists as the core of the title's mission, and its centenary programming — a year of decade-by-decade styling projects created with a working salon team and distributed in print and on social media — was designed as teaching content as much as celebration, breaking each historical look down into prep, placement and finishing steps a reader could reproduce.
Standing in Professional Beauty Media
Modern Salon's significance is its continuity: founded when the beauty shop itself was a new American institution, renamed as the industry professionalised in the 1950s, held by family-owned Vance Publishing, then by Bobit Business Media, and now by an owner who has consolidated U.S. and Canadian professional beauty titles. For directory purposes: founded 1924 as Modern Beauty Shop, renamed Modern Salon in 1952, published by BBM Business Media, listed with Torrance, California, website modernsalon.com, serving hairstylists and beauty professionals with technique, trend, product and business coverage.
