A Salon Santa Fe

Brides Beware

Alana does not honor her own prices and will drop you as a client no matter how close it is to your wedding. I hired her in Sept 2023 for my Oct 2024 wedding. I reached out in April to inquire about a trial, and Alana said she was available Mon-Thurs. We set a trial for July, but when she found out I live in Albuquerque, she said she can only come down on “specific days,” and she’d look for a date that she could come down. Weeks went by, I followed up, she hadn’t found a date. I followed up again several more weeks later, and suddenly her schedule was so busy that the earliest we could do a trial was in October, less than 3 weeks before my wedding. I offered to find us a space in Santa Fe to work out of, at which point she stopped replying to me completely and would only communicate through my wedding planner. I agreed to the late trial date even though I was uncomfortable with it. The week before my trial, Alana added the trial to my contract at a price of 200 instead of the 150 that she has listed on her website and that she told me, in addition to a 100 travel fee. When my planner asked why she charged me 200 for the trial, Alana said it’s because she doesn’t "normally" travel to Albuquerque so it’s for her “time and effort.” …Is that not what the travel fee is for? So she double-charged me (really triple, if you consider that she also added a 20% gratuity to the trial fee AND the 100 travel fee). Instead of 150, my trial would be 360. I don't understand how a traveling HMUA with no studio space could be so opposed to traveling 45 minutes. My planner suggested to Alana that she should have communicated the price increase earlier than 3 days before my trial. Instead of honoring her own pricing, she doubled down and got extremely defensive. At that point, she suggested maybe we want to “go in another direction” and find a new hair/makeup team. Because Alana pushed my trial so late, there was so little time to find a new team that we opted to keep the contract with her. 2 HOURS before my trial (which I took off work and got a blowout for), she unapologetically texted my planner and canceled the trial - with no proposal to reschedule. She made sure to note it had nothing to do with “the situation.” Right. My planner didn’t respond as we were busy looking for a new hair and makeup team. 2 days later, Alana emailed to say she felt “disrespected" by our lack of response, asked again if we wanted to "go in a different direction" (AKA find a new HMUA team two weeks before the wedding), and said that if we didn't respond by the end of the day, she would cancel my contract first thing the following morning. She can go weeks between replying to emails but expected my response in less than one business day. She demands a lot of respect for someone who doesn't respect her clients, as evidenced by the fact that she did not attempt to reschedule the trial or offer any kind of apology for wasting my time and money. In our exchanges, Alana called me entitled for asking for my deposit back but attempted to frame it as though she didn't owe it to me, though by the text of her contract, the deposit was fully refundable. She said she felt “reprimanded” by us because we asked for clarification on the random trial price increase. We were nothing but polite in the face of extremely unprofessional practices. Alana is unprofessional, uncommunicative, condescending, and exploitative and I do not recommend her.