Alter EGO has occupied a second-floor loft on East Hargett Street since 2008, which makes it one of the older independent salons still standing in downtown Raleigh. It opened the year the financial crisis broke and has since added a second, smaller location (Salon Deux, two blocks east at 605 New Bern Avenue) without spinning out as a chain. Per the salon’s own About page, it is family-owned, originally led by a mother and two daughters. Dana Hunter Rosa (Owner, Master Stylist) still cuts hair, as do co-owners Aspen Johnson (Associate Program Director) and Meghann Holland (Lead Colorist at Salon Deux, Extensions Specialist). April Hunter (Chief Image Officer) and Shawn Turnbull (Chief Strategy Officer) round out the ownership group on the business side. The decision-makers are in the building.
The work is weighted toward color. Roughly half the menu (balayage, blonding, lived-in color, grey blending, correction) sits inside one disciplinary territory, and the salon has built a steady second business on fixing color from elsewhere. Customers who arrive with a box-dye situation or a botched blonde are common enough that correction has its own intake conversation. The other thing the salon is known for is curly hair. DevaCurl-certified stylists cut texture dry, and the team will turn down requests outside their range rather than take a swing.
Practically: booking runs through a short matchmaking survey on the site that pairs you with a stylist by hair type and goal, or you can text the front desk at the (984) number. Pricing is not on the homepage, but the salon does publish per-service starting prices on individual service pages. Worth checking the relevant service page before you ask for an estimate, especially for color or extensions. The space is exactly what ‘urban loft’ suggests: exposed brick, big windows, plant-filled, the kind of interior people photograph. Parking is street or one of the Hargett-area decks. The building is up a flight of stairs.
Alter EGO leans heavily on award and ‘voted best’ language in its own marketing. We do not list salons by awards or rankings, so we will not repeat the language here. What we can say is the customer review pattern across 1,000+ entries on multiple platforms is consistently strong, and the complaint pattern does not show what would worry us. No recurring color disasters. No pricing-at-checkout surprises.
