Her salon – Beehive Beauty – is located in her house on Cumberland Head, a peninsula on Lake Champlain northeast of Plattsburgh. She’s less than a mile from the ferry to Vermont, and the lake is a stone’s throw away from her backyard.

“Because of where we live – I just watched a crow fly by with a big piece of bread in its mouth,” she said, looking out the window, “when the windows are open in the summertime, we hear the wind, we’re hearing the birds, we’re hearing the bees, we’re hearing the waves on the water, and people have come to appreciate it.”

Boolukos, 60, loves her job – the place, the people and the artistic freedom.

“It’s creative, all the different aspects of the hair and beauty business. I like this little world that I get to do it in because I get to have my stuff out. I like objects, obviously.”

Boolukos works alone. She has one chair in front of a large, round mirror. To the left is a window with a view of the driveway. All around the salon are those objects – artwork mostly.

“My husband’s a painter. My best friend is a sculptor. People bring me little things. People make stuff for me,” she said. “I feel like I’m in a little Faberge egg … and I like that world. And I like it that I get to be in my house, too.”

Boolukos lives and works at 48 Sunnyside Dr. It’s the house where she grew up, but she didn’t always live here.

After graduating from Plattsburgh High School in 1976, she eventually found her way to San Francisco, California. She was working a job and attending city college in 1986 when an idea popped into her head while getting a chiropractic adjustment next to the receptionist.

“We were both on these machines, and she was saying that she thought she’d go to school and become a massage therapist,” Boolukos said. “And I was lying and thinking, ‘Well, maybe I should get a license and do hair’ because I’d been cutting friends’ hair, and the creativity of it is what drew me.”

Boolukos said she’d always liked accessorizing her hair, but becoming a hair stylist wasn’t a life-long dream.

“I don’t know how it was that it sparked something, but I looked into it and I found Miss Marty’s School of Beauty and Hairstyling on Union Square in San Francisco and I went – for nine months, 40 hours a week.”

Boolukos opened her own salon in San Francisco and moved back to Plattsburgh in 1989 after her mom died. Over the next six years, she opened a salon in Plattsburgh and finished her studies at SUNY Plattsburgh, a double major of anthropology and an independent studies program titled “studio arts and media in a cultural context.”

In 1995, Boolukos moved to southern California, where she married her husband and had a daughter, and they moved back to Cumberland Head in 2003.

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Down to business

Beehive Beauty is open by appointment only with hours Tuesday through Saturday. Boolukos offers a number of services, starting with the haircut – shampoo, conditioner, cutting, blow drying. Then there’s hair coloring, skin care, makeup and special event up-dos such as making high school girls look pretty for the prom.

“I would like people to leave feeling happy about themselves,” she said.

When clients arrive, they may be greeted by the 11-year-old dog of the house, Nestor, a golden retriever mix – “a happy North Country blend.”

Boolukos begins by asking clients what they’re looking for, and they go from there. It could be a new hairdo or a skin care question.

“It’s important that I leave enough space in an appointment to be able to address those concerns,” she said, “because if we take off talking about the movie that we saw or what’s going on or what we’ve heard on the news, it might be that somebody really wanted to know something about how to best use their eye shadow or what did I have new or how do they want to take care of their hair color.”

Boolukos said it usually doesn’t take much for a person to feel like they’ve gone through a huge change.

“I’m thinking, ‘Gee, I haven’t done much.’ And they feel transformed.”

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Tools of the trade

Boolukos uses a number of tools in her salon, including clippers, curling irons, a hair dryer, combs and styling implements, but the most important are her scissors. She has a few pairs, but her main scissors- Hikari Dragon Cosmos – are made in Japan. She sends them to California once or twice a year to have them sharpened, and at the end of the day, she cleans and oils them.

“If you have a really good foundation of a haircut, it can last you. It will grow out well. And so I put a lot of attention in having a really high quality pair of scissors.”

Boolukos learned the hard way to put her scissors in a drawer between appointments. They’re only supposed to be used for cutting hair, but one client had another idea.

“I had them sitting out between clients and a customer had come and she had just gotten herself a new coat. And I had gone to the bathroom and when I came back, she was cutting the tags off her coat with my scissors, and I almost had a heart attack.”

It’s important to have a good pair of scissors because not all hair is the same. There’s fine and coarse hair, curly and straight.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, nobody can cut my curly hair. People don’t like to cut curly hair.’ And I think that for me is a breeze more than super, super straight with no movement.”

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Beauty products

Boolukos has also created her own line of beauty products under the Seven Flowers of Luxury brand. She started while in southern California with a skin cream she called Heavenly Pink.

“When my daughter was born, I made some cream because I wanted something with natural, no preservatives, no emulsifiers, no nothing. So it’s a super simple recipe,” she said.

With the help of a 2013 entrepreneurial grant, Boolukos was able to upgrade the salon and buy raw materials and equipment for the beauty line and hire a graphic artist to create a logo. Her small-batch, hand-crafted products are sold in several retail outlets in New York, including the North Country Co-Op in Plattsburgh. She makes skin cream, a scrub, hair oil, a balm called Farm Hands, a tinted lip balm in three different shades and other products.

“I like to bottle everything in glass. I don’t use preservatives. I don’t use emulsifiers. It’s super simple, super clean, organic ingredients, unrefined so you get all the nutritive qualities of the shea butter, etc.”

Boolukos was influenced in the early 1970s when she bought a book titled “Jeanne Rose’s Herbal Body Book.”

“Even from way back then, I love the things with essential oils, brewing chamomile tea to rinse my hair and all these different things,” she said, adding that she got turned on to jojoba oil while studying belly dancing in southern California after seeing a fellow dancer use it to remove makeup.

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Shop talk

Boolukos always finds time to socialize with her clients, talking about all kinds of topics: hikes, skiing, the weather, trips, art shows, vacations, etc. The state of the world is a popular topic.

“I really like it because I’m very social as well, so it fulfills my social needs and my creative needs.”

Boolukos said there’s something that happens when people sit in a chair and they’re looking at themselves in the mirror.

“I think it brings a different level of conversation sometimes. And I don’t know what that is, if it’s sort of somewhat meditative, if it’s because somebody’s touching your head and you’re just all relaxed or why. But I find that usually conversations are pretty deep in the salon.”

Sometimes Boolukos is the talker, and sometimes the client is the talker.

“And one of the rules of thumb, in beauty school, they tell you you can’t discuss politics or religion, but that doesn’t really happen here. Sometimes we get a little bit riled up.”

Then there are people who don’t like to talk at all. They come in for a maintenance cut and try to get out as quickly as possible.

“It’s really funny because it’s very quiet in here, and my clock makes a funny little sound,” Boolukos said. “So I’ll be snipping away, and it’s just like, tick, tick, tick. You know, you hear the scissors, you hear the clock, and it’s like, ‘Oh.’ We’re probably both just going like, ‘Please, let’s get this done.'”

For the quiet – or the inquisitive – there’s a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution on the counter below the mirror.

“I thought that that would be great reading material for anybody who might be bored and not want to talk to me,” she said.

At the end of the appointment – talkative or not – Boolukos said each client has the opportunity to be accompanied safely back to their vehicle by her dog, Nestor.

“And he will not come in until the door is closed and the motor starts.”