Every October, the North Hills campus of Empire Beauty School on McKnight Road turns into something closer to a haunted house than a classroom. Mannequin heads sprout towering, impossible structures. Nail tips get lacquered into tiny scenes. And somewhere in the room, a student is building a hairstyle out of something that is emphatically not hair. This is the school's Halloween competition, and on Monday, Oct. 19, from 10 a.m. to noon, the doors open to the public for free.
The event is billed as The Art of Scary Student Competition, and it is the culmination of a process that starts weeks earlier and several miles away. Empire operates three campuses in the Pittsburgh area -- North Hills, Monroeville and West Mifflin -- and each one runs its own in-house competition first. Students compete for the right to represent their school at the next level. By the time the regional showdown arrives, the field has been whittled down to the top finishers from each category across all three locations, and they converge on North Hills to compete for the regional title.
The categories are where the event gets strange, in the best way. Long Hair Design rewards the kind of patience and structural engineering that most people never associate with a blow dryer. Nail Artistry compresses an entire Halloween scene onto a set of nails. Total Fantasy Look is the full-body category, where hair, makeup and costume merge into a single character. And then there is Anything but Hair, which is exactly what it sounds like: students are handed a mannequin and told to create a hairstyle using anything except hair. The results tend to involve wire, paper, fabric, foam, flowers, and whatever else a student can talk an instructor into allowing.
The competition has been running long enough to have developed its own traditions. Empire's Western Pennsylvania campuses have staged a regional contest in both spring and fall, and the fall edition is the Halloween-themed one. In past years the school has branded it "Experience the Art of Scary." The spring version, by contrast, is "Experience the Art of Beauty" -- same format, same three campuses, same Steel City Trophy on the line, but without the cobwebs.
The format has stayed remarkably consistent. At the spring regional, the categories were Avant Garde (Total Fantasy Look), Trend Cut & Color, and Nail Artistry (Nails in a Box). The fall edition swaps in the Halloween framing and, at least in the version advertised for this year, adds Long Hair Design and Anything but Hair to the lineup. The in-house rounds begin in the weeks before the regional, with each campus sending its top winners forward. In the fall 2025 edition, the top three winners from each category across all three locations advanced to the final at North Hills.
That final is scored cumulatively, and the campus with the best overall performance takes home the Steel City Trophy. In fall 2025, Team North Hills won it. The individual winners that year included Maria Garcia and Nico Pomalaza Perez in the Avant Garde/Total Fantasy Look category, Emma Lattner Lane in Trend Cut & Color, and Riley Sedlock in Nail Artistry. There were also fan-favorite awards voted on by students from Lawrence County Vo-Tech, which gives you a sense of how far the event's reach extends beyond the school's own hallways.
The school leans on the local community to make it work. Past regionals have been judged by community members and supported by local businesses that donated prizes for the winners. That community-facing spirit is part of why the event is open to spectators at all. It is, in effect, a free Halloween-adjacent art show put on by people who are still learning their craft -- which is part of the appeal. The work is ambitious and unpolished in equal measure, and the Anything but Hair category in particular tends to produce results that are either astonishing or hilarious, sometimes both.
Empire Beauty School is part of Empire Education Group, a cosmetology school company headquartered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, that traces its founding to 1934. The North Hills campus sits in a strip of McKnight Road retail north of the city, one of three Empire locations serving the Pittsburgh market. The school offers programs in cosmetology, nail technology and teacher training.
For anyone who has never watched a beauty competition up close, the format is straightforward. Students work against a clock, usually with a mannequin rather than a live model for the fantasy and structure categories, while judges circulate and score. Spectators can walk through and watch the work take shape. The two-hour window on Oct. 19 covers the competition itself; the school has not publicized a detailed schedule of when each category runs, so arriving at 10 a.m. is the safest bet for seeing the full range.
It is a free event, and it is genuinely open to the public -- the school has promoted past regionals with invitations to "come cheer on the finalists." The address is 4768 McKnight Road, Suite 500, Pittsburgh, PA 15237. For a Monday morning, it is an unusual way to spend two hours: no admission, no reservation, and a room full of people trying to make something beautiful or terrifying out of whatever they can get their hands on.