Hair is one of the most effective tools anyone has. You can curl it, straighten it, dye it any color of the rainbow, and even attach other people’s hair to your hair.

Since a good or bad haircut and totally change the shape of your face (I mean, no average, feminine woman looks great with a crew cut versus long, flowing waves) hairdressers are the guardians of female power. They wield scissors. They apply foils. They make you.

Since I’m going to be judged on appearance, I wanted to put the best head of hair forward.

So I entrusted my head of coarse, dark hair to Gregory Wilde at Salon 26 in the North End, who specializes in producing the kind of long, lustrous, flowing locks that Blake Lively-wannabes can only dream of. I expressed my lifelong desire to be blonde, and he said perhaps in the future, he could do some nice light caramel coloring. But for now, he made an executive decision to give me chocolate brown highlights.

a cute, subterranean salon in the North End, a stone's throw from great red sauce Italian.

I have a lot of leftover color on the tips of my hair from dying it red, and after methodically and expertly covering my head in foils, the color on the mismatched bottom now matched the top. Then he worked some more magic with some extra shine and blowing my hair out into soft, satiny silk.

not as scary as it looks, promise.

Finally, he finished off with a GHD iron and again, magically curled my hair into voluminous waves, sprayed it with some hairspray, ruffled it for some volume, and sent me on my merry way.

Thanks, Greg, for a great salon experience. Be sure to grab him for an appointment if you can!

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1. A Culinary Day in Flushing, Some Political Protestors, and my Hairdresser
2. A Vietnamese cooking class with Harvard University Dining Services’ Director Martin Breslin
3. A Boston Epicure’s Photo Dispatch from Shanghai, China
4. Join the Harvard Culinary Society!
5. The food blogger’s guilt