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Wednesday February 27, 2008

Susan Beausang's Web-based company offers rayon and silk headscarves, head-warmers and exercise scarves with a sprawling number of design options.

Attached to the designs are playful names like Endless Summer, a fabric that resembles the iridescent inside of an abalone shell. The Call of the Wild is a vibrant scarf with wild and wavy black and brown lines forming a bold animal print. And shades like Blue Whisper, a quieter periwinkle blue, offer more subtle tones.

For the last two years, Beausang has been selling unique head wraps with the intention of helping women who have lost their hair for a variety of medical reasons to embrace their new selves, instead of hiding from them.

Her signature item, the Beaubeau, is delivered ready-to wear with fashionable accents.Her primary demographic consists of cancer survivors, chemotherapy patients and women with conditions like Alopecia.

"My job is to ease them into some kind of comfort level," said Beausang, a native of North Haledon and graduate of Manchester Regional High School.

Beausang does not have cancer, but she often gets confused for someone who does. Six years ago, she began to lose her hair at a disturbing rate and was subsequently diagnosed with Alopecia Universalis. Her white blood cells, doctors told her, were attacking her hair follicles as a result of the autoimmune disease.

"It came upon me in literally one day," she said. "Within three months I was totally bald."

While the condition was not life threatening, it was certainly life altering.

"For a long time I would look in the mirror and I would have no recollection of that person in front of me," she said.

After trying on a variety of wigs, she became dejected and rarely left her home.

"Susan is very fashionable, very hip, very current," said Rebecca Mitchell, a friend of Beausang's. "She had a certain way about her, so when she lost her hair she kind of hibernated for a while."

To remedy her deteriorating self esteem, Beausang took a more proactive role in her recovery and set out to carve a new fashion market for women suffering from hair loss. The options for head coverings, she remembered, were bland and uniform. She envisioned a more modern approach to hair substitutes, one that would accommodate more fashion-savvy women and act as a kind of therapy for the dramatic physical transformation that coincides with certain ailments.

She and her husband, both former traders on the floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, found a suitable Internet host site, www.4women.com, to market her future line of progressive accessories and her product was born.

Today her Beaubeaus are sold in more than 40 boutiques and treatment centers all over the United States and Canada.

Grateful customers have filled the testimonial page of her Web site with inspirational anecdotes and thanksgivings.

"I am a high school teacher and your scarves have been a godsend," writes one of Beausang's patrons. "I ended up having to shave my head not once but twice since my hair fell out a couple of weeks after my first chemo treatment...The scarves have been a good fashion accessory for me."

Beausang currently resides in Sarasota, Fla., but she makes frequent trips back to Passaic County to visit with family. One of her brothers is a Passaic County Superior Court judge and another is a builder in Wyckoff.

Beausang, coming from three generations of breast cancer survivors, credits her family as an additional inspiration for the Beaubeaus. After testing positive for the BRCA2 gene, which increases the likelihood of developing hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, she opted for prophylactic surgery as a preventative measure.Doctors told her the successful surgery and presence of the cancer-causing gene was completely independent from her later Alopecia diagnoses.

Her emotional proximity to the breast cancer and Alopecia communities encourages Beausang to reach out to her customers on a personal level.

"People just don't understand," she said. "When they see a child or an adult who's different they make all kinds of assumptions."

After her sales quadrupled over 2007, Beausang still tries to answer the customer service calls.

"They don't want an employee who can't relate," she said.

In the North Jersey area, her Beaubeaus are available at the Image Recovery Center in Paramus, The Valley Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Hackensack University Medical Center.

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