About: written by Steve Poltz

Sharon Daddi is Salon Tonic.  Now, I know what you are saying.  How can a person be a salon?  Isn’t a salon an inanimate object, a building?  Ok maybe that was a little bold.  She is not actually the salon, she embodies the salon.  You see, you know how some people were just born to do things? For instance:  Picasso to paint, Frank Lloyd Wright to design buildings, Salk to cure polio? Sharon was just meant to cut hair.  In fact, I wouldn’t be going too far as to say she is obsessed with hair. Ok you remember Charlie’s Angels and Farrah Fawcett? Feathered Hair?  I mean it just sounds cool.  Feathered hair.  Imagine being a little girl and hearing the words feathered and hair.   Ding ding!   (If this were a play, this would be the part where  bells would ring and birds would tweet.)   Sharon became not just  highly focused on hair, but on fashion and design overall.  She squirreled away her money and took her tips from working in a coffee house in San Diego and spent that hard earned cash on a trip to London, which was at the height of the punk rock and new wave movement.  Suffice it to say, Sharon Daddi was in heaven.   A hair cornucopia.  A veritable visual hair overload.  Every morning she woke up with eyes wide, full of excitement with a laundry list of things to do and see.  Simply put, this trip confirmed the fact that Sharon Daddi was born to travel and learn new things.  In high school she would wake up in the morning, drive 2 hours up the coast to Vidal Sassoon in Santa Monica, and let the students do whatever they wanted on her hair.  She would drive back just in time for dinner to be met with the disapproving stare of her conservative yet loving father.   As they passed around the mashed potatoes and gravy, they couldn’t help notice, “oh, today Sharon’s hair is blue, wasn’t it pink yesterday? Will it be a Mohawk tomorrow? By the end of the day Sharon would be so tired she would fall off to sleep with a dream that maybe one day she would actually own  her OWN hair salon.  So what did she do?  She went to Humboldt State.!?  Then she worked for the state of California.  In insurance claims!? Well–everybody has their own spirit path. Everyone has to find his or her way.  There’s a cool record by Tom Waits called Raindogs.  Raindogs are dogs that are lost in the rain becaus the rain has washed away the scent of their pee that they left as a trail to get back home.  Sharon’s Humboldt and working for the state years were her raindog years.  Then the spirit maker tapped her on the shoulder and one morning she woke up and it was all as clear to her as the light of day.  Boom!  “What the heck am I doing, I need to open a hair salon!  I don’t need to do it five years from now, I need to do it now.”  She tapped into the same well of emotion and feeling that she had upon her first trip to London.  She woke like a woman possessed and started to learn about cutting hair while building out her own salon.  She studied hair like her life depended on it.  She would wake every morning at 5  and would work 15 hours until her eyes would be glazed and spinning much like the eyes of the badger in the movie The Fantastic Mr. Fox (if you haven’t seen this movie, run as fast as you can and watch it!)  She found the idyllic location, and planted the seed of Salon Tonic in the freshly poured cement of the burgeoning area of San Diego that is known as Little Italy.  Forget about the fact that most businesses fail after two years, Sharon was a dynamo and ignored all warnings from anybody who would try to dissuade her from pursuing her passion.  10 years later, she is still in business. She’s taken numerous trips to New York studying at Bumble and Bumble and with the blessings of B&B carries their prestigious line of hair care products.  With a clientele now in New York and San Diego, and a passion for travel that still burns as bright as it did in her youth, Sharon now has a bustling salon with 13 chairs and a lively staff that is best described by one word-”family.”  We all have our own spirit paths that we travel, everyone has a story, and this is the story of one girl who got to see her dreams come true.  Welcome to Salon Tonic.