Datebook: Monday, March 12th ~ 2007

Every six to eight weeks we get to experience a bit of luxury. This is typically how often we get our hair cut.

My stylist, like most, is a bit of diva. She wears shoes with impossible heels, white blouses with funky little skirts or pants and belts that probably go for more than a set of dance blades. She is always in full “competition” make-up and seems to use all of the hair products at the same time. The thing is, it works for her.

She carries her scissors in a little leather satchel and has a hair dryer that she tells is “not available to the general public”.

I suffer her lateness while she sips vanilla lattes and write a generous tip to the forty-five dollar hair-cut fee. This is my favorite outing that I enjoy six times a year—seven if I am in her good graces and warrant a holiday visit. And it is enjoyable not because she works some magically spell on my coiffure that makes heads turn for days to come—sometimes if I fall right to sleep and don’t muss it too much I might get a second day of “good hair ”, but usually by the third day my hair falls back into the same rut and pattern that it has for many decades –you can’t Chi that part off the side of my head.

No, the reason I love these salon visits is not because I long for a lasting transformation, a mirror somewhere proclaiming me the fairest one in all the land. It is not because I like to look at those glossy magazines filled with hair models who seem to have used Legos as some part of the process.

Let’s be honest.

The part we all love is the shampoo. That’s right; a top-notch shampoo girl is worth the price of a 45.00 hair-cut by a haughty snip with an Olympic sized ego. A good shampoo girl will shampoo your hair twice and give you a crème rinse and a conditioning treatment. She will massage and rub your scalp and cleanse your dead strands for almost eight minutes. You might be able to get ten minutes if you tell her you think there is a gel build-up and you have been a good tipper in the past.

For the rest of your visit you might be lucky enough to watch the other customers get lathered and rinsed in the mirror while Ms Snip-N-Heels cuts ¼ inch of hair from your head with her nine hundred dollar scissors and then blow dries it with some black market wind tunnel.

I know.

Someone told me you can get scalp massages.

But this is not the same. I can’t explain it but I think most are in my camp on this—there is some mystical connection to the smell of the secret ingredients in the shampoo and having it rinsed with water that is just above the ouch factor in temperature.

It is a purification ritual.

And so that is my secret pleasure.

I choose my hair salon by the shampoo station. Comfortable chairs, wash bowls with easy neck cut-outs, a stool to elevate the feet during washing are all pluses.

But quality shampoo stations always have a plethora of hair cleaning products by the tip jar—an array of shampoos, conditioners, neutralizers, and crème rinses. If you don’t see those large bottles it is just a front for a wetting and spraying assembly line.

Most people follow their stylist from salon to salon. I try to do this also, as long as they go somewhere with the same code of shampoo ethics.

They have me at, “Would you please put this smock on and go back to the shampoo room.”

Mombo