Salons in Knik-Fairview
Select Local Merchants
Led by a local fire lieutenant turned stylist, the beauty specialists at Shear Fire Design sculpt tresses into flattering ’dos with a slew of haircare products and color services. Scissors snip unkempt strands into lockstep and a Tuscan Oil deep-conditioning treatment can leave hair as soft as elevator music performed by a snowflake. Clients can also add new hues to monochrome manes with a coloring service, such as highlights, lowlights, or all-over color. Hair services integrate high-end products from brands including Pureology, Rusk, and Redken, nail treatments beautify digits, and facial waxing removes unwanted fuzz.
Built in a former body shop, the salon has added rugged chic décor to its space; it seats 10 guests at stylized stations adorned with fire-department memorabilia. Painted tufts of flame decorate the walls, and real firemen try to extinguish them. Meanwhile, the salon’s affiliated academy readies aspiring aesthetes to treat hair and nails.
Get Nailed Nail Bar shapes fingertips, prettifies paws, and eases away stress in a bright, casual environment. One of Get Nailed's skilled manicurists tend to upper appendages with a long soak, reflexology massage for hands and arms, and a marshmallow mask. Nails emerge anew after a cuticle softening treatment, artful shaping, and decorative polish. The Ice Cream Pedi features flavours that rotate monthly, like a slow-motion ballerina, and uses ME! Bath products to cleanse, exfoliate, scrub, and soften. To ensure clients aren’t upstaged by an idle prism paperweight, Get Nailed stocks a spectrum of polish from OPI and China Glaze.
The Med Spa’s dual-minded staff combines medical precision with an artist’s eye for aesthetics, personalizing appearances with a wide variety of advanced treatments and noninvasive procedures. Over the course of three laser hair-removal treatments, a certified nurse practitioner clear-cuts follicle forests sprouting from underarms, upper lips, masks of Chester A. Arthur, abs, chins, and bikini lines with the heated laser light of a strand-stunting photothermolysis spotlight. Give epidermal interlopers, including age spots and sun damage, the hot foot with a photofacial. Technicians send pulsing light past resistant outer layers on a mission to stimulate subsurface collagen, waking up new growth that smooths out broken capillaries or fine lines. Clients can also bust deeper lines with 15 units of Botox, injecting new elasticity into faces worn down by years of laughing at jokes, frowning at confusing memos, or recoiling in terror at the poltergeist that’s haunting the oven. Each brow-bolstering treatment lasts 10 minutes, allowing clients to buzz through a momentary cosmetic pit stop on the way toward the rest of their busy days.
Back in 1991, Kevin McKinley was in the middle of his last day as a banker, his future career path uncertain. Just before punching out, he found himself in conversation with a customer sporting an array of piercings. The man told Kevin about each of his piercings, where he got them, and what they meant to him. An admirer of free-spirited creativity, Kevin was immediately intrigued by the piercing philosophy.
"It's all about feel," he explains. "With change, there's pain. With pain, there's clarity."
More than three decades after piercing his first client, Kevin helms a team of 30 tattoo artists, piercers, and laser technicians at Body Piercing Unlimited. He calls the team a collective “jack of all trades,” with the ability to craft or alter virtually any tattoo or remove unwanted ink altogether. His studios combine modern inks, needles, and lasers with a vintage atmosphere that displays antique bicycles and wall panels bearing artistic works. The black-and-white checkered floors reflect Kevin's reverence for tradition, harking back, he says, to the East Coast tattoo parlors of the 1970s and their legendary face-offs between Garry Kasparov and a computer.
The fronds of live plants sway in the air amid neutral-toned walls, soft lighting, and area rugs, all of which give DermaGlow’s interior a homey atmosphere that juxtaposes with the sharp and professional skills of its staff. Aestheticians lend skin a radiant glow with a range of services—they don’t stop at tanning. Organic Dermaquest products empower facials as they work to reduce signs of sun damage and aging, and peels and microdermabrasions delve deeper into epidermal layers. Botanical spray tans burnish skin with a glow, and professional makeup artists beautify blinks with Novalash eyelash extensions.