Woodside Hair Style Salon has been on 61st Street since 2012. The training is Fashion Week; the room is Queens.
Nadia Reyes grew up in Woodside and spent fifteen years travelling into Manhattan to work backstage — Fashion Week, lookbooks, press days, the whole circuit. What she noticed, over and over, was that the technique she was using on models was not complicated. It was just careful. And nobody in her own neighborhood was getting it.
So in 2012 she took a lease on 61st Street, two blocks from the 7 train, and built the salon she wished had been there when she was fifteen: editorial standards, plain-language advice, and prices printed on the wall.
Marisol arrived from a bridal studio in Astoria and took over the back room, which is now a proper bridal suite. Priya came from a color-correction specialist in Manhattan and built the color bar. Dominic brought a traditional barber's training from Northern Boulevard. Kayla, who started as an assistant here, turned the awkward corner by the window into the kids' corner.
Five people, five real specialties, one room. That is the whole business.
That a consultation is worth more than a technique. That telling somebody their hair is not ready for a service is better business than taking their money. That a first haircut matters more than a magazine cover. And that none of this should require going to Manhattan.
Woodside is one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, and the chair reflects it. Between the five of us we work in seven languages.
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Queens, NY
Nadia opened the salon after fifteen years working backstage at New York Fashion Week, where she learned to build a look that survives a runway, a photo shoot and the walk home. She cuts shape first — the sculptural bobs, blunt fringes and lived-in layers the salon is known for.
Marisol has styled more than four hundred weddings across Queens, Manhattan and Long Island. She runs the salon's private bridal suite, works from a trial that pins down every detail months ahead, and travels to the venue when the morning calls for it.
Priya is the salon's colorist and the person other stylists send their hardest corrections to. She paints balayage freehand, builds blondes over several sessions rather than forcing them in one, and will tell you honestly when a color will cost more upkeep than you want.
Dominic trained in a traditional barbershop on Northern Boulevard and brought the precision with him: scissor-over-comb, sharp line-ups, and skin fades that grow out cleanly instead of falling apart in two weeks.
Kayla runs the kids' corner, where the chairs are small, the cape has dinosaurs on it and nobody is rushed. She has a real gift for a first haircut — the one that decides whether a child spends the next decade dreading the chair.
Consultations are free, take about half an hour, and commit you to precisely nothing.