Health and Wellness

Making a Stylish Splash at Aqua Salon

Find a new you for the new year in North Kingstown

So Rhode Island Magazine ·

I’m just going to say it: no stylist ever gets my haircut right the first time. I have a lot of very curly hair, which looks different on any given day (or in any given humidity). It’s difficult for a stylist to see my hair one day and produce a cut that works on the next. There’s always an adjustment period, where I have to wait and see how it dries over the next few days, then go back for a touch up. In fairness, I can’t really blame a stylist: it’s taken me 20 years to figure out how to manage my mop.

Or, I should say, no stylist ever got my haircut right the first time until I met Brenda Dimon on a rainy, sleety night in December. I pulled up to North Kingstown’s new Aqua Salon and Spa in the dark, rushing in from a long day and a traffic jam, looking pretty much my absolute worst. She immediately ushered me into the spa’s cushy pedicure area, where I sank into a swanky couch and sank my toes into a warm, bubbling pool. Lindsay, my nail tech, gave me a deluxe pedicure, using high-tech pedicure products from LCN, a German company. High tech pedicure might sound like fantasy, but it wasn’t. The combination of products she used, from the foot soak to massage cream, a foot mask and lotion, gave me soft skin with barely any scrubbing. Basically, Lindsay gave me a great pedicure that managed to skip all the gross parts of the pedicure. The same went for the deluxe manicure afterwards, where I chose an icy blue polish that Lindsay finished with a super cute snowflake pattern.

Then, it was into Brenda’s stylist chair. A master colorist with years of experience behind the chair and educating at salons up and down the East Coast, Brenda’s natural abilities as an educator came through the minute I sat down. She looked at my hair and immediately diagnosed the problem: that no matter how cute the cut is when I first get it, it always, always grows out into a triangle shape. “It grows out like this, right?” Brenda asked, moving her hands out to the sides. “I’m going to texturize your curls in a way that allows the shape to fall into place.” I can honestly say that I’ve never had a stylist so immediately “get” me, my hair issues and not just what I wanted that day, but what I wanted two months from then. It was a great feeling.

At the sink, Brenda used Goldwell Kerasilk shampoo and conditioner on me, and a hot towel soaked in essential oils that really boosted my increasing feeling of zen. Then, Moroccan Oil products as she cut, snipped, texturized and structured in ways that are way beyond my comprehension, but worked. I left that day with a shiny, bouncy blowout that stayed for almost a week. When it was time to go back to my curls, I could tell on the first day that Brenda had figured out the secret to giving me a great cut, no touch ups necessary. A month later as I write this, it’s growing out beautifully – no triangles in sight.

Aqua Salon and Spa
6730 Post Road, North Kingstown
398-0569

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