A friend took me to Los Feliz to one of those ubiquitous mini- mall "chop shops." I was not at all comfortable there, sitting in a plastic chair like some kind of tacky suburban memsahib while young women whose names I didn't know knelt before me, servicing my feet with questionable implements, while an acrylic-taloned Kathie Lee Gifford cackled loudly on an overhead TV. This was not a minor luxury, as my friend had promised. No, for me, this was more like going to the dentist.

This is how I walked into Paint Shop, a new Zen-style salon on Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills. "A few years ago, nail color went crazy," says owner Julie Serquinia, "but the salons didn't. They were all the same. We wanted to create an alternative." Her husband, Domingo, a hairstylist, designed the great polished pine chairs, a step up from those clinical swivel chairs, where clients--both men and women--can read books from the "spiritual library" or plug into headsets and listen to New Age CDS while they sit for treatments.