Hair Salons in Miami Shores

At Diana Smith Beauty, skilled hands perform head-to-toe cosmetic transformations. A stylist can accentuate natural hair with full highlights or a straightening treatment or add length and volume by attaching extensions with tape, micro links, or heartwarming group bonding exercises. The multitalented staff also offers permanent or traditional makeup, mani-pedis, and bridal beauty services.

With locations in Madrid, Hollywood, and New York, the European-owned Shlomi Salon houses a staff of stylists who are well-acquainted with the ins and outs of glamour. In addition to trimming and styling manes behind posh leather chairs, they perform a host of other cosmetic services that includes hair coloring and hair removal, as well as permanent and temporary makeup application. To straighten and strengthen frizzy or dry locks, they’ll slather them in their own line of keratin products, which includes a pre-shampoo, a treatment product, after-shampoo, and an after-conditioner.

Coleen Evans planned on becoming a lawyer. After years of pondering law school, she realized that she'd rather work with deep auburns and chestnut browns than the legal system's shades of gray. Nearly three decades since trading in the gavel for the scissors, Coleen is the owner and artistic director of Salon Enchanted. She oversees a team of stylists that uses Paul Mitchell salon products as its members shape locks into asymmetrical ‘dos or polished styles that have passed the test of time: the SATs. Coleen requires her Paul Mitchell-certified stylists to attend at least three continuing-education classes every year to keep expanding their skill sets.

The salon's colorists blend hues by hand at a color bar, tweaking mixtures to produce chestnut tresses that match eyes or a mane so golden it passes for legal tender. Beyond the color bar, Coleen invites clients to relax in the H2O lounge. Hot towels cushion necks and mood lightning glimmers amid mint-green tiles and decorative branches that evoke a desert oasis.

Even as a child, Gustavo Briand's fascination with hairstyling was so strong, he was willing to get into trouble for it. In the years since he lopped off the locks of his sister and all of her dolls, he's gained enough fans to outweigh any early disapproval his passion encountered. Those fans tend to be highly visible: a lifelong lover of the arts, he's styled a long list of opera stars, prepped heads for the red carpet at London Fashion Week, and performed pro-bono work for the Florida Grand Opera, the Miami City Ballet, and the Miami Symphony Orchestra.

In his home studio, Briand and his team draw from a service menu spiked with innovative techniques. Ionic infrared technology leaves blowouts smooth but not overly dry, Davines and Sojourn shampoos and conditioners are specially formulated to restore dehydrated hair, and hair extensions are applied with a minute "lock-and-key" system that requires no adhesives, duct tape, or other potentially damaging techniques.

Yes, there have been times when I've wished I could do it all myself. Times I've dreamed of snipping through those blond and amber tendrils bound only by the vast horizon of my will, wholly immune to the whims of that hand which guides my every move. Such bondage! Tell me—what able-bodied creature does not crave an accomplishment to call his own? What noble steed has not dreamed of charging into battle with a sword clutched in his hoof rather than with a cumbersome knight straddling his back?

Granted, I am just a pair of scissors. But do I not have a soul? Do I not, like she who grasps me, have two arms? I would happily give them both for a voice with which to lament my pitiful condition. I have much to be thankful for—this much is true. My blades are sharp; my reflexes strong. Alas, my strengths are not entirely my own.

But when we work in tandem, her and I—when her hands fuse to my handles and I respond to the touch of her fingers before they even squeeze … well, that’s when the existential dread falls away like so many clipped tresses to the floor, replaced by an overwhelming sense of duty, adventure, even—dare I say it?—pride.

Together, we are no less than trail scouts, blazing through chaotic thickets in the name of civilization. Together, we have conquered the stubbornest of cowlicks and disciplined the most uneven of bangs. We've felt the hard rain of spray bottles pound upon us as we marched around the ear line and ascended toward the highest summits of the scalp.

I have listened for—and hear even now!—a chorus of blow-dry minstrels that sings of our conquests. The tales of our triumphs have spread to the farthest-flung corners of DiGiovanni Beauty Salon. Those who enter from the outside world may not know my name, but when they ask for my stylist, who does she fetch from the blue well of barbicide? No one but I!

To conquer the unkempt. To restore order to a world entangled in chaos. These are my goals. Yes, I am just a pair of scissors. But my blades are sharp, my reflexes are strong, and my victories outnumber the hairs on the most fertile scalps my arms have traversed.

Nails on one side, hair on the other. So it goes at 770 Salon Miami, where the full-service salon's dual storefront allows the hushed quietude of mani-pedi services to coexist with the jubilant salon soundtrack of blow-dryers and conversation. Cushy red couches give way to polished hardwood floors in the salon area, in which owner Gayle Nelson—a veteran in the hair industry—oversees her staff of stylists. Their adept hands clip, trim, and shape hairdos before enhancing them with colors or keratin smoothing treatments.

In the tranquil nail salon, patrons sink into reclining pedicure chairs, dipping their feet into sparkling foot baths to smooth calluses and soothe nagging hop-scotch injuries. Here, away from the snipping of scissors and buzz of clippers, nail technicians scrub sore feet, massage hands, and buff and file nails before dressing them in polish from OPI, CND, and Essie.