Beautylicious | | TORO MAGAZINE | What Men Need to Know about Sex, Style, Music, Sports, Drinks & Video

FEATURE

BEAUTYLICIOUS

POSTED BY: Salvatore Difalco
October 28, 2009
Bio | More from this contributor

When I was approached about covering a piece on salons and spas, for the upcoming Beautylicious event going on in Yorkville, the centre of Toronto’s beauty and wellness industry, I was hesitant. My editor told me I would enjoy it, that it would do me no harm to get freshened up, but I still felt reluctant about submitting myself to girlish beautifying treatments and menacing muds and unguents. I thought my poker chums would find it laughable if I showed up to the game with manicured and shellacked fingernails or a hip hairdo more suitable for a man about town in his 20s than a middle-aged pen pusher. The clever editor approached my desk with a compact and held it before my face, unable to stop himself from smiling. I glanced at my reflection in the compact mirror and shuddered. To my horror I looked like a 50-year-old man.

Okay, I am 50, but I truly looked my age on this particular morning, grey, tired, bloodless, defeated. So without further debate I agreed to join my editor for a spa day and record my impressions. I must admit I slept poorly the night before. I didn’t know what to expect. Of course I’d heard and read enough about spas and salons and pedicures and soothing massages and aromatherapy and so forth not to be completely in the dark about what to expect. Still, I’d avoided becoming a metrosexual up till now. Then again, I was too old to be considered a metrosexual anyway. So the hell with it, I thought.

We met at Salon Daniel in Yorkville the next morning at 9:30 for the first part of our spa day, a promotion that included hair and skin analysis, hair treatment, basic haircut and styling, eyebrow shaping, toe buff and nail polishing. We were immediately greeted and ushered upstairs where master stylist Daniel performed his magic on a customer in the window overlooking Yorkville Avenue. A fine rain fell outside, lending everything a cool and moody vibe. Hair stylist Jolie Mackey introduced herself and escorted me to her station where she gave me a quick consultation. She thought my salt-and-pepper mop had a little too much salt in it and suggested that I colour it and, presto, take 10 years off me. Having never dyed my hair or even considered it, though I’d seen it being done in salons before, I cringed imagining the rigamarole of foil and applicators and mud-like pastes being smeared all over my head. I told MacKey that a nice clean cut would be fine, that I didn’t have a ton of time to mess around with my brittle, fading hair. She scoffed.

MacKey, who came to Toronto from Newfoundland a few years ago and previously worked for L´Oréal, told me that it wouldn’t take that much time. “L´Oréal has a few new products specifically tailored for men. It’ll take no more than 10 minutes to apply the colour, and no foil. I promise.” She explained that she was going to balayage my hair, using a brush to literally paint a mixture of colour onto a section of hair with one of three designs: singles, slants and V´s. Difficult to argue against this, I conceded to the treatment.

After a tingling hair-wash and conditioning treatment I was ready for rejuvenation. She returned moments later with her applicator and colour and set to work “painting” my hair. She dipped and dabbed and within 10 minutes completed the job. A dark-haired manicurist suddenly thrust herself at my side. This was Ella the esthetician and she took my left hand in hers and studied it like a palm reader. She told me my nails were brittle and that my skin was dry, then she set about moisturizing the hands and clipping and buffing the nails. She also took a look at my face and highly recommended I increase my water intake and seriously consider a facial. That word made me wince. “You won’t regret it," she said, "believe me. It will take 10 years off your face.” With the 10 years that would vanish with the hairdo, and the 10 years subtracted from a face treatment, I’d look 30 years old again! I didn’t know if I wanted to look 30 again. I told Ella I’d have to think about it, and besides, as we had other things scheduled time would not permit it.

Meanwhile, MacKey transformed my hair with scissors, reshaping it from the Albert Einstein meets Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frankenstein lid that had mushroomed, into something decidedly sleeker, darker, sexier and more contemporary. “Do you like it?” MacKey asked. “I’ve just found myself a new hair stylist,” I told her.

Ella finished buffing my fingers and they looked beautiful I must admit. When I told her it was my first manicure she said, “I know.”

I looked not like myself when I departed Salon Daniel, but like my more handsome doppelgÃ¤nger, dashing, elegant, debonair. My editor, too, looked almost too handsome exiting the salon. Young fashionable women walking along Yorkville stopped and gawked at us. Well, no, not really, it was still raining.

We hurried over to the Manyata Courtyard Cafe for lunch, hoping to sample their Beautylicious menu, but were the first customers of the day and the place didn’t seem open yet. Fortunately Les, the waiter, appeared and told us that we weren’t too early. We ordered. My editor gave the savoury Shanghai Hokkien Noodles a mild thumbs-up; but I absolutely loved my Roasted Chicken Waldorf Salad, with its apples, nuts and blue cheese. We had no time for dessert, included in the Beautylicious lunch specials, and hurried off for our next stop at Jeanet Spa & Salon.

A warm and friendly white-cloaked staff greeted us at this stylish salon in the heart of Yorkville and we were treated to a 60-minute stress-relief massage, and a nirvana-like spa pedicure. My esthetician, Amanda Matcham, a British native who moved to Canada five years ago, pounded me down with one of the more robust massages I’ve ever had, rendering my achy, stiff muscles into something like softened butter, or lard.

Next off we headed into the pedicure room where my editor had already immersed his pale feet into one of the foaming pedicure baths, his face creased with bliss. Amanda now took my feet in her hands and performed something like a miracle, smoothing and clipping my horny toes back into human form. But I can’t overstate the sheer physical pleasure of having your feet massaged and buffed and beautified by a professional.

I asked Amanda if more and more men were treating themselves to these spa treatments, or if women still predominated. “In the past few years the number of men booking has increased a lot,” she said, “to where it’s something like 60 to 40 per cent women to men now.”

Both the editor and I agree that any man, indeed any human, would derive sublime pleasure and benefit from having a periodic pedicure, at the very least. After all, bipedalism has its drawbacks. We carry the weight of our lives, and the world, on our feet. Why not give them some love?

Indeed why not give yourself some love if you’re feeling a little bloated and grey and, like me, you’ve not been looking at yourself in the mirror much these days. One can hardly deny the salubrious and psychological benefits of the spa experience on the whole. If you’ve never tried it you don’t know what you’ve been missing.

Come to Yorkville for Beautylicious (October 28 to November 7, 2009) and feel beautiful again, and to visit a salon or restaurant listed below.

For more info: www.bloor-yorkville.com