The Daily Southtown: Wash & Set crowd Beauty parlor habit getting blown dry amid modern hair care trends by Carolina Proctor 5/10/2006 Every Friday, Charlotte Bendt visits the beauty parlor. A stylist shampoos her hair and sets it in rollers. Then it's an hour under the hooded dryer, time that Charlotte uses to write letters, study her Bible or, like today, take a nap. "I got up really early this morning," the 81-year-old Crown Point, Ind., woman says. "I'm really tired." Next, the stylist removes the rollers and combs Charlotte's hair into a style. The whole process takes about two hours. For Charlotte, it's worth every minute. After all, she would never try to do her own hair. "Forget it," she says. "I have no talent with hair. I first had this done when I was 8. I thought I'd burn up under that dryer. But the curl lasted and lasted." For years, this ritual — known variously as a shampoo set, a wash-and-set, a hair set, a roller set or an iron set — was the only way to go for most women. The weekly (or sometimes biweekly) visit to the beauty parlor was a chance to visit with friends, gossip and, most important, be pampered. "This is my only luxury," says 84-year-old Bea Haniford, sitting under a dryer near Charlotte at Bobbi's House of Beauty in Crown Point. Bea reads the newspaper, sips a cup of coffee and nibbles on a Danish. She laughs when someone asks if she ever fixes her own hair. "I get really aggravated with myself," she says. At Bobbi's House of Beauty, the shampoo set is owner Bobbi Doherty's bread-and-butter. That's because most of her clients are seniors. Younger women take a different approach to hair, opting for daily wash-and-wear styles, a practice that was introduced by Vidal Sassoon in the mid-1960s as a way for busy women to have a fresh hairstyle every day. Shampoo and hair care products became readily available in stores, rather than solely through beauticians, and women started doing their own hair. Today, visits to beauty parlors — now called salons — are for hair cuts or spa services, such as manicures, massages and tanning. As a result, the weekly shampoo set is dying. "Those days are long gone," said Anthony Voltattorni, owner of Anthony's salon in Valparaiso, Ind. "Most of our work is cut-and-blowdry. Hairdressing has taken some evolution. We had to convince the world that hair could be worn flatter." Voltattorni mentions a 63-year-old client whom he convinced to abandon her weekly roller sets. "The quality of her hair was so great, I talked her into a modified wedge cut. It's softer around her face, like an old Dorothy Hamill style with several motions in several directions," he said. "Other stylists never looked at her hair's potential. They just said, 'Let's perm it.' But this is what it's about, getting a more modern look." In fact, stylists at Anthony's do shampoo sets for only a handful of older, longtime clients, or for special occasions such as weddings or proms. But even those occasions can be done with a blowdryer and curling iron rather than the roller set. Still, Voltattorni says, "it won't die out 100 percent. There will always be people who want a little support." Those people are people with especially thin hair. Most of the time, they tend to be elderly. "As far as senior citizens, the majority of them stay with roller sets," said Rose Wolynia, assistant director of Merrillville Beauty College in Merrillville, Ind. "As their hair thins out, the tension from blow-drying and the heat from the iron is hard on it." A roller set produces formal, crisp curls. What it can't produce is the soft, flowing look of a wash-and-blowdry. "That's what people are going for now," Wolynia said. "But older people need that crisper curl." Doherty, owner of Bobbi's House of Beauty, agreed. "A blow-dryer will do nothing for those people with thin hair," she said. "The style won't hold up and it will make the hair look even thinner." Doherty has been doing hair for 42 years and has owned her Crown Point shop since 1993. Most of her clients are friends with one another. They're reluctant to change their appointment times because "they don't want to miss seeing their buddies." "They share recipes, tell jokes and sometimes go out to lunch afterward. If somebody's not here, they say, 'Are they OK?'" Doherty said. "For some of them, this is their only social time." Doherty's client Charlotte Bendt added: "The rest of the week, it's nose-to-the-grindstone." The decline of the weekly shampoo set doesn't mean the social aspect of beauty rituals is declining. "The weekly shampoo set thing is over, but it has morphed to the bimonthly highlighting set. Almost every woman you know colors or highlights her hair, and the more coloring, the more frequently she's in the salon," said Paula Conway, author of "The Beauty BUYble." Women with damaged or overprocessed hair will visit salons frequently for treatments and products still available only through professionals, said Dianne M. Daniels of the Association of Image Consultants International. Daniels also said salon culture is still very relevant to black women, who visit regularly for press-and-curl jobs. "It's still one of the cornerstones of the African-American community," Daniels said. "I go to the salon every two weeks, and I know some women who go on a weekly basis." Even women who visit less frequently for simple services such as haircuts don't have to miss out on the gossip and socializing. "We still have standing appointments (for cuts)," said Tony Promiscuo, who owns a salon in Atlanta. "The only difference is they are five weeks apart instead of one. So the gossip has time to ripen. The plot actually has time to thicken." And who says bonding over beauty rituals must take place in a salon? Mark, a brand by Avon, is researching young women and the concept of social beauty. "Instead of congregating at salons, young women are gathering for beauty purposes on a more informal basis in dorm rooms, apartments, sororities and workplaces," spokeswoman Stephanie Huang said. "Spa nights and getting ready together to go out are ways that women connect through beauty." Still, the traditional afternoon at the beauty shop has a nostalgic pull that can't be replaced, at least according to Sarah Gjertson of the University of Denver's School of Art. Gjertson has spent the last six months visiting beauty parlors throughout the Midwest taking photographs and video of what she calls "the disappearing parlor culture." "As the elderly clientele dwindles, the parlors are closing at a steady rate, taking with them their unique social culture," she said. "Their weekly visit provides them with more than a roller set. It's a place to connect with others." The Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana

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