My name is J. Caleb Runyon, and for the past two years I've worked as a nurse practitioner in dermatology. Time and again, patients would come in saying, "my hairdresser told me to have this checked out." Nine out of ten times, those lesions were malignant. I hadn't fully appreciated the role personal care professionals could play in early detection — until February 2025, when my Papaw was diagnosed with Stage 4 Melanoma.

My Papaw is a 77-year-old Southern West Virginian man. He avoids doctors at all costs, but he never misses his monthly haircut. As I processed that devastating news, one question kept surfacing: what if his barber had noticed that lesion on his neck before it reached Stage 4?

That question became a mission. Starting in Southwest Virginia, I began creating educational materials for hairdressers and distributing them to salons across my region — and the response was immediate. Manicurists, tattoo artists, piercers, massage therapists, and others all asked the same thing: "What about my profession?" The answer became The Closer Look Project.

What began as a regional skin health initiative has grown into something larger. Closer Look at Skin Health — our first vertical — trains personal care professionals to recognize early warning signs and connect clients with medical evaluation through our Referral Network. And we're just getting started. Closer Look at Geriatric Care is in development, expanding the mission into one of the most underserved areas of community health: the aging population.