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Sandie, herself a Brooklyn girl, was confident about the swap: of Rebecca, she said, “Brooklyn girls usually hit it off.” Charise was also optimistic, but admits, “The night before the show, I don’t think I slept more than 30 minutes. I stayed up until 3 a.m. packing! My mind was racing with thoughts about where I could be going, what I would wear, and how it would feel to have cameras all around me. And I knew no one—no family, no friends, no work contacts—in New York City. We tried to Google the salon before I left, but we got the name wrong, so I knew absolutely nothing about where I was going!”
Sandie recalls, “When I first saw Rebecca, I thought, ‘Wow, she is tall and hot. Real NYC-edgy-looking.’ And she had the strut to back it up.” Sandie explains that 85% of her salon’s clientele seek extensions for the long, thick, smooth, super-pretty look. By contrast, Hello Beautiful patrons take a walk on the slightly wilder side. Tangles clients, she says, are influenced primarily by the hair of celebrities, and place the utmost importance of keeping hair shiny and healthy. But the Brooklyn girls called for less traditional ‘dos, especially in the realm of never-in-nature color and deliberately funky, uneven textural effects.
Charise comments, “Hello Beautiful has bright-pink walls and leopard-print couches, and is much smaller and crazier than I was used to. The people were kind of rocker and punk-looking, compared with Rancho Cucamonga. The clients were very artsy, much like overall feel of the salon itself.”
She learned, however, that appearances may be deceiving. Defying the stereotypes of Southern California girls as ditsy, dreamy beach-bunnies and New York dolls as hard-bitten, twitchy and witchy, Charise also comments that her adopted East Coast clientele was “very laid-back and calm, relaxed, and open to do whatever I wanted to do. This is totally unlike my salon back home, where most of my clients want what they want.”
As for the East-meets-West transition, Sandie admits that there were “just a few ruffled feathers” when Rebecca worked on a client’s extensions, “but we smoothed it out. We had a couple of challenges, but it was really a fun experience, and we all got along really well. Rebecca actually formed an incredible bond with me and everyone on our team.” She adds, “Rebecca taught us her special way of wrapping the towel around wet hair. You hold the towel length-wise, wrap it around the ends of the wet hair in the back, twist around like a bun, then push in the ends. It helps to wring the water out of the hair faster, and really stays securely on the client’s head! She also showed us her great method for setting damp hair with a brush instead of always using a curling iron. Some of my girls at Tangles are doing this now—Big Apple style!”
So what if she’s never heard of an egg-cream? “From day one, the smiles and hugs I received at Hello Beautiful let me know that I was making life-long friends,” says Charise. |
