Shady Travels: Live, Explore, Learn: Highlights in Korea

No this is not an entry about the highlights of Korea, but rather a response to a reader of my blog: "Where do you get your hair done?"

Since I moved from Texas to NYC at 18 for my freshman year of college, I decided to do something drastic. I made a drastic move, therefore I needed a drastic change. Being ethnically Asian--specifically Filipina, going blond was just the thing. Throughout university, I was jet black, striped blond, all blond, brunette, and even burgundy. Now that I'm well out of university and my experimental days, I have stuck with blond.

After many conversations with foreigner blond friends, Zen kept coming up. It is called The Art of Zen. It's a small salon at Exit 1 of Ewha Women's University subway station. My first stylist was Sunny. She once interpreted "ash blond" as in NO RED to mean "platinum". My students called me "Grandma Teacher" for a good week until she fixed it for free with low lights to create a dark blond color. Since the miscommunication, she has understood my color as "bright sunny blond". She wasn't the greatest colorist, but she was very easy to talk to and created great cuts for me. She was Vidal Sassoon trained in London and is actually married to a Chungdahm employee which made our conversations pretty interesting. She would keep me for 5 hours as if my visit were a spa treatment. I was a bit skeptical because she was very pregnant when I met her. Nevertheless, I got to enjoy some People, Vogue, Cosmo while she and her assistant went at it highlighting, massaging, cutting etc. I don't go to her anymore because she has left to be a full-time mommy. Pretty typical for Korean's wives here.

The dark "grandma" look.
Winter 08-09

Now, I go to Yunny. She is a petite girl who spent most of her career in a salon in Australia. She looks like a university student, but she is well-married so there's not telling how old she could be. She is better than Sunny because she is in tune with the edgier styles of today. Furthermore, I'll tell her what I want and she'll counter with even better styles and color. I now spend around 3-4 hours in the salon, but this time with less magazine reading and more conversation about life, love, and traveling. I have been to her twice and have loved the results every time. She even threw in a hair treatment for free the last time I saw her!