J SALON
J Salon goes back to the basics with clean haircuts and shapes that flatter wearers while emphasizing the hair's health. CLICK FOR LARGE
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Season to Shine
The owner of J Salon emphasizes natural beauty in bringing styles back to basics
AT THE RISK of losing business, Joe Randazzo would prefer that his clients hear the compliment "Your hair looks great" rather than "Who's your hairstylist?" -- the latter suggesting salon intervention.
According to the hairstylist-owner of J Salon, the overdone 'do is over; long live healthy, shiny tresses that call no attention to the person responsible for the cut. For all anyone knows, your great hair is simply the result of your own impeccable grooming.
J Salon is at 1128 Nuuanu Ave., Suite 103. Call 550-4441 or visit www.jsalon.com.
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The message might be slow to reach those who've learned over the past decade to lock their hair in place with loads of product, or who've gone color crazy, layering highlight upon highlight upon highlight, but Randazzo's a laid-back guy with plenty of patience. Besides, not being one to follow any kind of trend, he's just going to do what feels right, often resulting in being ahead of the curve.
His Spring/Summer 2007 Collection encompasses looks that are sleek and polished, including the return of long hair for men. But more important than length is the health of one's hair. Key to all the looks are clean shapes and clean lines emphasizing the hair's natural-looking healthy shine.
"What I wanted to do is bring hair back to the basics, make it about what it should be, and that's beautiful," Randazzo said. "It's the second collection I've done since we opened in November 2003. Back then, a lot of girls where doing really stripey color. It was that orangey, brassy thing with fat, chunky stripes.
"Our thing, even back then, was about color melting, toning it down, getting rid of the stripes, and it wasn't long before we started seeing the change in the street."
IT'S JUST a natural color that hasn't disappeared but now encompasses a few shades darker or lighter than one's natural color, intended to add dimension rather than drastically alter one's look. People simply start to want what they see.
"It's like the Toyota SUV Jeep," he said. "When I first saw it, I didn't get it. I thought it was ugly, but the more I saw it, the more I began to think it was really cool.
"In hair, we're used to wanting what our friend has, but most important to anyone is suitability. The No. 1 mistake hairstylists make is to put things on the wrong person to make themselves feel cool, but it's not about the hairdresser, it's about the person wearing the cut.
"With a dramatic haircut, you're going to be a walking billboard for a salon, but you can be a walking hideous billboard."
RANDAZZO'S emphasis on natural look seems to have brought him to a 180-degree change from his early days at Vidal Sassoon in Chicago in the 1980s, when hair was sculptural.
"It was that sort of Flock of Seagulls thing. We did all that. I still love creative and there's a place for it, but if you open the pages of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar or W, how often do you see that kind of work? Even in the edgier magazines it's rare."
Even then, he said, the salon's work was about getting effects through the cut, not filling the hair with goop.
"A haircut shouldn't be about doing a million things to your hair. I never rely on product to make a style or to shape the hair, only to make it look healthy and beautiful."
Although he has many sources of inspiration, he enjoys looking at people to find unconventional, unintentional beauty, as in "people who don't know they're cool, someone who doesn't try to be cool."
He finds that's true about children. Although he doesn't cut children's hair, he says because they often don't sit still in the barber's chair, "Their haircuts aren't good. They're so unassuming sometimes it's really cool when their hair is sticking up on one side."
No one can argue that it doesn't get much more natural than that.