At David Mallett’s salon, everyone seems like a “regular”. It’s the sort of place where clients become friends, who invite their friends, who—I imagine—all go on vacation together, and that vacation is jetting to somebody’s villa in Majorca or Morocco or Madagascar. In my observations as an outsider (I’m usually the only person at the hair-washing station speaking English or wearing jeans), the David Mallett clan is an enigmatic lot of the most understatedly chic women Paris.

Jessica Noghes-Menio is part of that club. In fact, she might be its president. I spotted the statuesque, Oxford-educated twenty-something in the waiting room on a Tuesday back in early December. She had a jet-black, razor-sharp bob, was dressed in a loosely tailored, vaguely Belgian ensemble (Demeulemeester, maybe?), donning a blood-red lip and some serious, strategically placed ear piercings. And this was pre- Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. We had one thing in common, and that was Anthony—our colorist. Fast forward to March and I’m back in Paris, and at Mallett, to catch up with Jessica while she undergoes one of her many beauty transformations—she’s a bit of a chameleon, I learn, and has been “feeling very strongly about Marlene Dietrich, arched eyebrows, and old widows,” as of late. “I like having options, and I like trying new things.”

On this particular day, she’s readying herself for a dinner party with the help of several bottles of colored Bumble and bumble hair powder, Klorane Dry Shampoo, and her longtime stylist and co-conspirator Rishi Jok. She has bangs now, and her medium-brown, shoulder-length hair has been set in a decisively grandma-esque updo. Watch on… you thought there was only one use for dry shampoo, didn’t you?