First Look: Joanna Vargas Opens New L.A. Salon
Joanna Vargas opens a new, stand-alone salon on Tuesday in Los Angeles.
“Looking for a space took probably about a year, and construction has been eight months,” said the celebrity facialist, who’s closed the doors of her spa inside the Sunset Tower Hotel after five years.
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“In Los Angeles, as you know, you have to be obsessed with, ‘OK, where’s everybody going to park?’ And ‘What’s the neighborhood like?’” Vargas continued.
She landed on central and buzzy West Hollywood; at roughly 5,000 square feet, the new salon is at 1107 North Kings Road. With high-vaulted ceilings, it occupies a building that was once a theater. It’s bigger than her old space, which attracted about 50 customers a day.
“Business has been going really well,” Vargas said.
She’s the founder of Joanna Vargas Skin Care and salons, as well as author of “Glow From Within.” “I feel really lucky that we have are a huge clientele of rabid fans of not only the services, but the products. And the salon is bustling on both coasts.”
The business has seen 20 percent growth year-over-year from 2020 to 2023, according to industry sources.
It was in New York City in 2006 that Vargas unveiled her first salon. She expanded to L.A. in 2016 on North Flores Street by The Grove before relocating to the Sunset Tower Hotel in 2018. It’s where she continued to grow a name for herself, with celebrity clients who include Rachel Brosnahan, Mindy Kaling, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gwendoline Christie, Ariana DeBose, Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig.
Vargas has parking set, she assured. There’s a garage across the street, and a few private spaces for VIPs, who also have their own entrance: “We have a welcoming reception area. It’s a larger size. More along the lines of what I have in New York currently. There is a secondary reception area. I have a private entrance on this location as well, right adjacent to the private parking area that I have.”
Inside, expect MDSolarSciences SPF and Sara Happ among the lines of products available for purchase, along with her own beauty brand. In product development, she highlights her new Twilight Night Serum and Night Cream, which incorporate epidermal growth factor — a protein that was developed to speed up wound healing at the cellular level.
“There are eight facial rooms,” she explained. “There’s one massage room. There are two rooms for LED beds and then one room for relaxation pods, which are oxygen treatments that you lay inside of….Clients will have an easier time booking in, which is always my goal. I know that sometimes it sounds chic to have a waiting list, but to me, I find waiting lists a bit horrifying. I want people to have the services that they want when they want them.”
With the new opening, she’s reintroducing her popular Triple Crown Classic Facial as the Triple Crown Royale Facial. Noninvasive, it’s been upgraded, she said, with new patented technology for an even more contoured and lifted face. The treatment — priced starting at $375 for 90 minutes — includes microdermabrasion, microcurrent and vitamin-spiked oxygen.
“Clients in L.A. really like newness,” she said of the market. “They like having like the cutting edge of everything. And everybody’s really obsessed with anything that can address sun damage, the effects from the sun, and anything that retexturizes or evens out the pigment in the skin because the sun is so strong. Also, people wear more makeup in Los Angeles than they do in New York. So, I think having that perfect palette of, you know, baby skin underneath your makeup is really important to the L.A. public as well.”
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