Lisa Chiccine: The Hair Whisperer

Lisa Chiccine is one of the world’s top hairstylists, with movie stars, royalty, fashion icons, Wall Street tycoons, heads of state, and socialites among her clients. Trained in Paris, London, and Milan, Chiccine is the protégée of the legendary Bruno Pittini, who mentored Frédéric Fekkai and Serge Normant.

Featured in hundreds of publications, including W, Glamour, People, and Oprah, she is constantly in demand by fashion editors and brides. She recently brought her talents to PARK, styling jeweler Kayla Rockefeller’s locks for our winter issue cover. A longtime client, Rockefeller wouldn’t let anyone else touch her hair!

An accomplished entrepreneur, Chiccine has developed a thriving business over 35 years as a top stylist. Her multifaceted career in beauty has included everything from runway shows to being the beauty expert for Oprah Magazine to countless weddings that have been featured in the New York Times and Town & Country.

Sought after as an unbiased authority by Wall Street firms investing in hair care products coming to market, she meets with scientists across the globe to evaluate their new innovations in the field. She has developed her own hairstyling products over the years that have been highly successful on QVC; so successful that she gave up the TV home shopping format because it required too much time away from her first love, styling clients’ hair. (Her products are sold in select salons and boutiques.)

 

The Hair Whisperer

Known among cognoscenti as “the hair whisperer,” Chiccine wields her scissors at three single-chair salons in New York City, Palm Beach, and on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Always booked, hersalons are the epitome of exclusivity, yet they offer a warm, welcoming, relaxing environment. With her impeccable taste and sophisticated sense of style, Chiccine has become something of a lifestyle guru to her loyal clients, who rely on her not just for working magic with hair but also for advice on fashion, wellness, and travel. “Customers always say they leave feeling beautiful inside and out,” she says.

Her salon has become a hub for empowerment—not just for women, but also for some men. “Life happens, whether it’s a nervous bride, someone who’s losing their hair, or somebody who has a friend going through a terrible time,” says Chiccine. “We keep things calm, we keep things inspirational, we keep the hope going, and we keep everybody in good shape, emotionally and with their beauty.”

That intrinsic warmth and her fun-loving, charismatic personality make Chiccine a natural on camera, and she often appears as a beauty expert for broadcast outlets like E!, the Style Channel, Good Day New York, QVC, and on PIX11’s New York Living segment.

 

Humble, non-intimidating

Chiccine dislikes the term “celebrity hairstylist.” “I don’t want to use the word celebrity because I’m not. I’m a hairdresser, not a brain surgeon,” she says. “But humble and grateful, yes, that I am.” She flatly refuses to name clients. She had no comment when we mentioned that we’d heard that a certain Oscar-winning actress is a regular. A 2010 W article revealed that she styled locks for Prince Pavlos of Greece and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I used to keep a book for clients to sign in. I stopped that practice, and that will never happen again,” she explains. Her high-profile clients appreciate that she doesn’t divulge their names.

However, Chiccine is able to laugh about the circumstances involved in working with people in such powerful positions, like Netanyahu. “Doing someone’s hair while standing next to armed guards, with men on the roof and being surrounded by the Israeli Secret Service, that was pretty amazing to me,” she says.

Self-made, Chiccine knew what she wanted to do from her earliest years, and she built a hair care empire on her own terms, establishing herself at the top of the industry through pure talent and determination. In effect, she created her own brand years before the advent of the internet and influencers.

Chiccine is active in supporting research on autoimmune diseases, a cause close to her heart, as it has affected her immediate family.

 

From Barbie dolls to Paris to Bruno Pittini’s first female protégée

Chiccine has been doing hair since childhood, styling her Barbie dolls. In college, she turned her dorm room into a hair salon, and then talked her parents into letting her go to beauty school. She read the European issues of Vogue, where Bruno Pittini’s work was constantly featured, and headed to London, Paris, and Milan for additional schooling.

Once back home in Pennsylvania, she took the bus to New York, went to Bruno Pittini’s Madison Avenue salon, and announced, “I’m here for a job with Bruno.” “Ignorance was bliss,” she told PARK with a laugh. Pittini was in Paris at the time, and the shop manager told her it would never happen, since all his assistants were European and male, but as she talked, he became intrigued and arranged a meeting at a later date.

“My interview with Bruno was him staring at me, basically saying, ‘What do you want?’” Chiccine recalls. She kept talking, and he gave her a blow-dryer to see if she “had it in the wrists.” He immediately realized she had a gift and created a job for her. One day, several of Pittini’s assistants were out, and he asked her to do a blow-dry. “Nobody got to blow-dry for Bruno. His six-man team was it.” She filled in, and he said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life. I’m going to take you under my wing.” Chiccine ended up replacing all six assistants and doing 50 blow-dries a day herself.

Six years later, when Pittini was dying, he told his clients, ‘Who knows how to cut your hair better than Lisa?’ “And I’ve had those clients ever since, and I’ve built on them. So that was my turning point. We had a connection. I was the little sister he never had. We had a very, very special relationship. He was my life-changer.”

Single-seat salon

From there, Chiccine had star stints at swanky mega-salons, but she soon realized that wasn’t the right situation for her. “I was working six chairs at a time with an assistant following me back and forth, and that just felt so impersonal. I was never bonding with clients.” In 2006, she opened her one-seat salon in Manhattan. “Private room, dial me direct, no tipping. I’m the owner, there won’t be an assistant here, let’s talk. That’s when people started feeling good inside and out, and that’s when it really became beauty therapy.”

And she truly finds great happiness in pulling her clients together inside and out and making them feel so good. “I have literally been doing hair since I was four years old. It is something I’ve been doing for many years, and I can’t wait to go to work every day. I just love what I do.”

Learning to become a CEO and businesswoman from behind the chair

While Chiccine’s parents instilled in her the values required to be a good person with integrity and a warm heart, she credits much of her business success to clients who have guided her with their expertise while in her chair over the years.

She is particularly appreciative of one very special longtime client and friend who has been especially generous in advising her. “I absolutely treasure him; he is so kind and beyond brilliant.” They have established a “tip a month” routine in which on each visit he dispenses his favorite piece of advice. “He has a magical way of seeing the big picture in everything and knows exactly how to guide me to get there.”

Upcoming book

With such a colorful career, styling hair for world leaders, supermodels, and Hollywood greats, vetting the hair care products and gadgets we all use on a daily basis for private equity moguls—and even, on one occasion, steering the inventors of such an item away from an investor she later found out was less-than-scrupulous—it’s no surprise that Chiccine has a book in the works. Details are under wraps for now, but we are confident it will be as much of a success as Chiccine herself.

 

Teaming up with Dr. Jane Salmon to fight autoimmune disease

A cause that hairstylist Lisa Chiccine is passionate about is research on autoimmune disease, which has afflicted both of her parents. She has worked for many years with Dr. Jane Salmon, a world-renowned research scientist who treated Lisa’s mother, helping to raise funds to advance treatment options.

“I am just so grateful, she gave my mom her life back,” Chiccine says of Dr. Salmon, who is the Collette Kean Research Chair and Director of the Lupus and APS Center of Excellence at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), and Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “I can’t even express how much Dr. Salmon means to me.”

Because of her mother’s life-threatening systemic autoimmune disease, Chiccine learned about the challenges that patients face from the medications used in treatment, which dramatically alter the body. “Their hair gets very thin, they gain weight in places they might not want to gain weight, and they get acne. They have profound fatigue and struggle to effectively manage their lives,” Dr. Salmon explains. “And as their disease remits and the inflammation of the organs resolves in response to their treatments, the physical side effects of the drugs that helped remain.”

Chiccine put her professional training into action, organizing beauty gatherings for patients at HSS in Manhattan. She rallied colleagues who would fix their hair, apply makeup, and talk to them about their body image and how to find clothing that minimizes the changes in their bodies. She brought gifts for patients. “That was Lisa’s concept, to help people understand they were beautiful, even if their body had changed as a result of their medication,” Dr. Salmon says.

Her mother’s condition also spurred Chiccine to develop her line of hair care products, which are all geared toward thickening and giving greater volume to thinning hair.

Later, Chiccine decided she needed to do more, and realizing money is the key, she created an endowment to fund trainee scientists to work in Dr. Salmon’s research laboratory. Over the course of her career, Dr. Salmon has trained 35 investigators who have worked in her laboratory to further her goal to improve the lives of women with autoimmunity and to develop effective therapies with tolerable side effects.

Over the years, Chiccine and Dr. Salmon have become close friends, and they have found they have many things in common. “When Lisa was emerging in her field, there were very few women,” says Dr. Salmon, adding that her own experience was similar. “I was the first woman in the MD PhD program at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and we were both able to move forward despite not looking like anyone else in the room.”

Chiccine believes that we have a job in life, and then we have a purpose. “My job is cutting hair, but my purpose is definitely bringing attention to this cause and making people beautiful.”