Look Good, Feel Better

Gini Gramaglia spends her days surrounded by beauty - the 100­year-old Victorian house she's converted into a hair salon, the 1875 dressers inside, the antique reproductions, the atmosphere of serenity and order.

Look at her: Dark hair pulled back; gold earrings; smiling. She's high-energy, yet calm. Fast-talking, but gentle. A casual elegance.

Yet amid the cutting and coloring at her Upper Southampton shop - Gini G's Salon and Day Spa - is something else.

There's a heart to all this hair.

     Gini G donates time to the American Cancer Society's program for chemotherapy and radiation patients ­"Look Good, Feel Better," it's called.

She teaches cancer patients at area hospitals how to handle the effects of treatment - hair loss, skin color changes, brittle nails.

"It's kind of like a 12-step for makeup," she says. "We talk about the temporary changes they go through, their hair loss. Sometimes they lose their eyebrows and eyelashes. Some people lose their toenails, or their nails break or they get brittle. Or their skin coloring changes or they get blotches."

Step into the bottom floor of Gini G's Salon and Day Spa and about 80 eyes look back at you: rows and rows of mannequin heads, each holding a custom-designed wig for chemo patients.

Gini G fits the wigs, shapes and styles them to match the patient's real hair.

"When people leave they don't look like they have wigs on," she says. "When a patient leaves here, my goal is to have them leave confident and feel better about themselves.

"It's traumatic for women to lose their hair - that's their femininity, their beauty. It's devastating enough to find out they have cancer."

Gini says hundreds of cancer patients have come into her shop for wigs.

"They're like my heroes," she says. "They're survivors. A lot of these women are young. They just have a will to survive and it's beautiful."

Gini fIrst saw that will to survive 13 years ago when she was in beauty school.

"I was taking my dad for chemo treatments and sitting in the doctor's office. 1 saw a young woman that had no hair. It was shocking.

"For a man to be bald is so natural. For a female to be bald is so unnatural. When my dad was going through chemo he lost some hair and nobody even noticed."

Gini G was 23 when she lost her dad, just before she opened her own salon and started helping cancer patients.

"I consider myself privileged, lucky, because 1 share such an important part of their lives - it's such a precious time in their lives.

Gini G stands amid the wigs she designs for the women.

"My priorities, 1 think, have changed. 1 think it's an awareness. It makes me more aware of life and appreciating things every day. We're very big on saying that, but living it is totally different."

Call Gini G's Salon and Day Spa at 215­396-0886.

Return to "IN THE NEWS"

©2006 Gini G's Salon and Day Spa.
All Rights reserved