Beauty and The Beach

A few months ago I left the world of fashion behind, abandoning my Los Angeles high-rise apartment and moving onto a 30-foot sailboat moored way up in Ventura County. Here in the land of the Beach Boys, “inner beauty” is the only kind that counts, so my Gucci loafers and Ferragamo pumps are consigned to a storage locker next to the Oxnard Airport. No matter. Style-consciousness in Ventura can be summed up by the fact that a majority of people under 25 wear puka shell necklaces without a trace of irony (a custom I immediately and eagerly adopted). The surprise is that inner beauty seems to take as much work as the cosmetic kind, as I learned through visits to various holistic neighborhood spas, in search of that authentic endless summer glow.

At Pacific Coast Day Spa in Ventura’s old town, owner Lars Johnson, who truly gave me the best massage I’ve ever had, said, “Beauty is based on health, not glamour. We don’t do hair, or anything stinky, like acrylic nails.” A spa for “everyday joes,” the walls are decorated by local artists and an herbal steam sauna costs a mere $20.

Practically across the street from Pacific Coast, Ventura Healing Arts Center offers naturopathic medicine, massage therapy and yoga classes in a day spa where beauty also seems to come exclusively from within. You soon learn that everybody looks pretty good when you feel this relaxed and wonderful--bliss is blind. So who needs a hairdo at the beach? Not me.

Well, I don’t know about that. Herb-soaked, sun-bleached, makeup-less, wearing nothing but shorts and tie-dyed sarongs for months, I felt great inside. I was tanned, fit and very, very relaxed. But the truth was, the effect of sun, salt and chlorine on my hair was something no amount of inner bliss was going to cure. I soon began to wonder if I was truly glowing, or if in fact I looked a hellish fright. My angst led me to consult the local guru, and one of the great Southern California stylists, Billy Yamaguchi. He and wife Melissa run the Yamaguchi Coastal Day Spa in Ventura. The first indication that I’d come to the right place was the fact that both Billy and Melissa have long, lustrous hair--the kind that doesn’t need to be overly styled because it’s just so, well, lustrous.

Yamaguchi takes a Zen approach to hairstyling. He recently styled L.A. Laker Coach Phil Jackson for a photo shoot, and the two men hit it off. After all, they have a lot in common, since both men use ancient Asian techniques of focus and concentration in their work. And if you think getting Shaq to meditate in the lotus position is hard, try getting a Pasadena society maven to let you feng shui her hair.

That’s Billy Yamaguchi’s specialty. The spa, in an airy former bank building next to a Ventura shopping mall, is as quintessentially old-fashioned Southern California as it gets--a little Midwestern, a little funky-suburban. But the owner, an 18-year Ventura resident, strictly adheres to a Japanese method of feng shui he says he learned from his grandparents.

“At a fashion show I watched him measure off the models’ faces in this certain way,” recalls his wife. “So I pulled him aside and said, ‘Billy, you’re feng shui-ing the models!’ ” Yamaguchi hadn’t even realized he was doing it. From then on, the Yamaguchis concentrated on formalizing the techniques by which Billy makes a haircut come out not as a style statement, but as a sort of chi-enhancing experience.

“Part of the process is about taking into account the fields of the face, finding a balance between eyes, mouth and hair,” Yamaguchi says. “But your feng shui changes over time with where you are in your life.” At the beginning of the consultation he asked me to respond to a range of colors, and I picked out blue-green and white-gray ranges. Back in my urban days, I might have chosen fiery hues and gotten a sexy, short haircut. But the earth is closer to where I am now with my formless blond tresses. Yamaguchi recommended that I go with a touch of wood--more blond highlights in addition to those the sun and salt had started--and suggested that instead of cutting my hair, we trim it and then let it grow long and wild.

For the first time in my life, I left a salon looking like myself rather than a fashion statement. The new blond shimmers and the long, blunt cut, I realized, are exactly what I have always seen when I close my eyes and picture “me.” So this is inner beauty, which has nothing to do with pretending to be beatifically unconcerned about appearances, all the while praying that some kind of mystic “glow” will emerge to carry it off. No, as Master Yamaguchi taught me, it’s about getting the inside you and the outside you to match.

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Styled by Lisa Crockatt; hair: Danielle Russell/Rex; makeup: Nicholas Whitehead/Rex; model: Malain/Elite