Jagged Edge Retreat

I've been meaning to blog about the Jagged Edge Retreat since there's really not much about it online.

My stylist is Cara, and I like her a lot.

The whole place is fantastic, actually. The salon is painted blue, and there are these giant trees all over. Each of the stations is made in basically the same style, but the wood and details about each of them are all different. It's totally a trendy place. I think most of the stylists have tattoos. They use Redken products.

I started going several months ago. I had Jess find a place online; I was actually thinking of a particular place downtown, but I couldn't remember what it was called. She found this one, and set my appointment for me, and I went. It ended up not being the place that I had wanted [thought I wanted?], but when I walked in, I immediately loved it. Although I had been planning on just getting a haircut, I knew that it would be a waste to leave without having them do color.

Back then, I had been doing my hair at home and it had gradually become more red than I wanted, and then I had kind of matched my natural color... kind of. My hair was growing out and you could see the part that was dyed and the part that wasn't, but I don't think people noticed unless they were looking closely. So I told Cara that I wanted something different, but I really didn't know what, and I showed her a couple magazine pictures of layered haircuts.

She suggested highlights to bring it all together. I said that was fine, but that I didn't want to look like a zebra. My first stylist back in California used to do my highlights, and I kind of felt stripey, especially looking back at pictures. Cara understood.

And that was the beginning of that. I liked Cara because she had so much personality! (She still does.) We chatted a bunch, and I was having guy problems back then and she was the one who sang "just gotta keep on keepin' on" which I still think about sometimes.

When I went back, she totally remembered me. She remembered where I worked, and my mission in Italy, and the guy problems, and everything. And she asked all about it, and we picked right up where we had left off. She has a little index card that she uses to keep track of the exact amounts of color she does each time so that she knows how to get the precise colors we do for me.

And that's how it is every time. We're friends. At the beginning we talk about what I want, and plan out my hair, and I always leave a couple hours later feeling like my hair is artwork. Right now we're doing blonde highlights and dark brown (...lowlights?), mixed in with my normal hair color and the caramel that we used to do. I think it looks smashing!

They also do extremely trendy hairstyles, like whoever you know who has amazing, amazing hair, except better.

It is kind of spendy, but for people who Googled this and just want to look awesome, it's totally worth it. And for everyone else, I wanted to share pictures, since the place is super random.

[Also, PS, they are usually busy-- I took the pictures at my last appointment, which was a late appointment, and I decided it would be nicer to avoid pictures of other people since I knew I was posting them on the interwebs. (Except at the front, because they were there and I wanted one of the front anyway.)]