Mica Hair Studio

The research came before the design. Reading across roughly forty-five salon websites, the pattern was consistent enough to build against: the category has fully solved transacting and has barely begun to solve deciding. Almost every site is a booking widget with photographs around it. Very few help the person who is sitting there unsure whether the thing she wants is called balayage, whether her box dye from last year rules it out, or whether the price she has seen is the price she will pay.

So the concept came from the trade rather than a design gallery. A colourist's swatch ring exists for exactly one reason: a photograph lies and a swatch does not. It is the object that ends the argument before it starts, and it is the only honest way to answer what will this look like on me. Making the website that object gave the build its hero, its palette, its structure, and its argument all at once.

The signature is the ring rendered in WebGL2 with three lighting states, and its value is that one of those states is bad news. Under the six-in-the-evening light, levels one through four crush together and become indistinguishable. That is not a rendering flaw, it is the reason a colourist walks you to the window, and putting it on the homepage turns a policy the customer would otherwise experience as a delay into something she has already seen for herself.

The commercial layer is where the category actually loses people. Prices carry a ceiling instead of a starting-at, which is the construction the trade's own body has condemned and which the whole industry still uses. The booking page does not hand a first-timer a jargon menu and ask her to pick; it asks about her hair in plain language and names the service for her, with a real number and a visit count attached. Every stylist page states what she does not do, which is the fastest trust move available to any specialist and one almost nobody makes.

The accessibility work is a design feature here rather than a compliance chore, because the category leaves it almost entirely unpublished. Step-free entry, a measured door width, where to park, which days the room smells like colour, how loud it gets, and the fact that a silent appointment can be requested with any stylist. For a customer with sensory sensitivities or a mobility aid, that block is the difference between booking and not, and all it costs is the willingness to write it down.

Technically the build is deliberately austere. There are zero cross-origin requests in the browser, so the page loads without a booking widget, review embed, map iframe, chat bubble, or font CDN. The motion runs on CSS scroll-driven timelines at zero kilobytes of JavaScript, authored so the finished state is the default and animation is pure enhancement, which means reduced-motion visitors and unsupported browsers get the composed page rather than a broken one. Cumulative layout shift measures 0.00141 at desktop width and 0.0021 on a phone.

The salon, the town, the stylists, the prices and the policies are invented. The system is real, and for a working salon the same build takes their chairs, their price list, their colour lines, and their booking path, with the ring holding their actual swatches.