Beauty & Spas in Hamden

Quality trumps quantity at The Cut Above, where the salon’s three stylists offer a wide range of services with most up-to-date haircare knowledge and techniques. Since 1977, the trio’s talents have continuously blossomed thanks to regular training and visits to trendy hair shows, resulting in a comprehensive menu that spans everything from color and keratin treatments to hair extensions and makeup application. High-end products from the likes of Redken and Rusk bask beneath soft lighting that cloaks clients from all sides, making for hair treatments unencumbered by shadows and ominous visits from stony-eyed owls. Framed by textured columns, the salon’s well-equipped stations rest between mirrored partitions to provide added privacy and the chance to see your hair from multiple angles.

For the past 15 years, Samantha "Sami" Angelini has been manicuring nails, banishing fuzz with honey wax, and wielding makeup brushes. She's freelanced for MAC and Laura Mercier, filling her portfolio with images that typify her natural, yet evocative makeup style. Today, she enhances eyes, lips, and cheekbones with Motives Cosmetics mineral-based makeup. She demonstrates her techniques during one-on-one lessons, and preps brides for their nuptials. Sami's artist's eye also guides her hands as she shapes brows into flattering forms—one of her specialties—or tops finger and toenails in chip-resistant polishes or thimbles.

In addition to clipping hair into chic and trendy silhouettes, Hair Power Salon's stylists lengthen manes with hair extensions and infuse strands with high beams of color. To transform gnarled hair labyrinths into sleek thoroughfares, the salon administers La-Brasiliana keratin treatments. Unlike other conditioning sessions, which mainly involve stylists hoping really hard at frizzy hair and then smoothing it with their tears of frustration, La Brasiliana gussies up finicky strands with collagen, leaving hair sleek and manageable for up to four months.

For more than two decades, licensed massage therapists Katie and Charles Wiltsie have welcomed patrons to the comfortable, home-like confines of Swedish Bodyworks. Alongside two other massage therapists, the pair of Wiltsies tends to their clients’ limbs and torsos with a diverse palette of massage and aesthetic services. Their signature Lypossage and LypoSlim treatments use a special style of deep-tissue massage and herbal body wraps as a means of targeting excess inches and helping to smooth cellulite. A fireside massage table allows clients to enjoy softly crackling flames as a therapist eases knots from the body, and a wide, breezy porch welcomes reflection, rest, or long tirades directed at freeloading garden gnomes.

Although the stylists at Headlines are whiz kids when it comes to traditional salon services and product lines by Goldwell, Wella, and Schwarzkopf, they do more than just manipulate existing hairdos—they also help clients regrow thinning strands with their signature laser hair-therapy sessions. The sessions use low-level-laser energy to noninvasively energize strands, which causes them to sprout like sunflowers in a tanning bed full of Miracle-Gro. After 6–12 months of weekly treatments, men and women can sport a fuller-looking head of hair.

Dr. Jeffrey Takahashi knows his lines. As chief of the Vascular and Interventional Radiology section of Middlesex Hospital and Director of the Middletown Vein & Aesthetic Center, he’s seen his fair share of venous disorders, which he evaluates and diagnoses using advanced Doppler ultrasounds of the legs. Beyond busting spider and varicose veins through a variety of services including sclerotherapy, laser therapy, and elimination by way of novelty-size erasers, he also aims his aesthetic gaze upward to tend to fine lines on the face, thwarting the passage of time with injectable treatments such as Botox or Juvéderm XC.