Salon Creates Cinderellas, Then Helps Find Prince Charmings

A shampoo, a set and thou.

Personne Complet, which claims to be the nation’s only combination beauty salon and dating service, promises not only to change stepsisters into Cinderellas, but also to supply the Prince Charmings.

The Ventura Boulevard hair salon’s dating service brags that it can do more than match size 6 blondes to studs in Armani suits.

But if the match goes awry and the prince later turns into a frog, the parlor’s staff hypnotherapist can help deal with the disappointment.

Warren Beatty found love in a beauty parlor as a gigolo stylist in the movie “Shampoo.” But this shop isn’t the creation of a screenwriter.

“At first I was proud of myself for making people pretty,” said Daryl Rapoza, 37, owner of the shop in Woodland Hills. “But then you want to make them more than pretty. You want them to be happy.”

So Rapoza created the ultimate in one-stop beauty shopping. In one corner of her brightly lit shop is a health food bar and a stair-climber exercise machine. Nearby is the cloistered office of hypnotherapist Maureen Boyle and near the front door is the Macintosh computer that serves as the nerve center of the shop’s thriving dating service.

Dark-eyed Carole Atkinson, 49, who says her so-called psychic abilities tested positive at UCLA, lays out well-used playing cards for readings. The dating service she runs began a month ago and is already backlogged.

Atkinson charges $50 an hour for a psychic reading, although a free, 10-minute reading is provided as part of the dating service. Atkinson feels she brings a unique quality to the conventional dating service. “Psychic counseling cuts through the social L.A. power plays,” she said. She charges each person $35 when she succeeds in arranging a date.

“There is a lot more going on in the beauty business than nails and hair,” Rapoza said.

That appeared to be an understatement on a recent afternoon. As the sound of clippers and hair dryers droned busily in the background, a 39-year-old businesswoman named Kathy sat down to fill out the 11-page dating service questionnaire.

She first supplied all the basic information, her height (tall), weight (slender), marital status (divorced-and-wiser-for-it), and astrological sign (Scorpio).

Then came the more personal questions that will help zero in on her perfect mate, such as whether she considered her personality to be “Trashy” or “Neo Classic.” Asked by Atkinson if she were interested in aerobics, her response was not very enlightened. “Don’t make it hard on me,” Kathy said.

Finally, she was asked what she would be willing to give up in a relationship.

“I’m not going to give up anything,” she said with the resolve of someone who clearly seemed to feel she had given up too much in the past.

“You’re a determined person,” Atkinson said intuitively. “A lot of men out there want women like that.” She felt sure she could find a match for Kathy.

For Rapoza, the beauty business came naturally. “I was born knowing how to cut hair,” she said.

But she was always interested in more than split ends and henna rinses. As she cut, she would listen to the tales of her clients. “I watched pretty people become ugly” when their lives became painful, and “ugly people become pretty just because they fell in love.”

In fact, she sometimes felt guilty at what she had created in her chair. “I used to say I’ve created another monster,” referring to a person who suddenly looked great but whose inner self was still in need of a makeover. “They turn into this gorgeous thing.”

She began to believe that “90% of the population is going around half-well,” and decided to see if she could do something about that.

From a small shop with seven employees, she moved more than a year ago to her present location in Woodland Hills, where she now employs 35 people. Besides the stylists and body-wrap experts, the staff includes Boyle, the hypnotherapist, and Atkinson.

Boyle is installed in a small office that can be darkened while she gives supportive suggestions over a set of headphones to her clients. A tape recording of a gentle rain plays softly in the background.

Atkinson, who said she was a concert pianist at the age of 4, has believed since her youth in her ability to see beyond ordinary reality. She said she used to stand on the corner trying to predict the make of car that would drive by next.

But it wasn’t until she enrolled at UCLA in the 1960s when interest in psychic phenomena was growing, that her abilities were tested as part of a psychology class, she said.

But it wasn’t until the early ‘70s that she began doing readings. For years, Atkinson refused to take any money for the service, and earned a living as an executive for a computer firm.

One gets the feeling that Rapoza has designed her own favorite playground and she is one of Boyle’s steadiest clients, consulting the hypnotherapist to learn how to find pleasure in her life beyond work. And while cutting Atkinson’s hair, Rapoza may have a reading done.

But, in Rapoza’s mind, it is not so much a dating service as a mating service that her parlor offers.

“I’m not interested in finding someone a date for the evening,” she said. She wants to find people a date for the rest of their lives.

“There is no form of psychotherapy in the world better than a partner,” she said.