Rants & Raves is usually as blasé about hair salons as its author is about grooming.

But Tease changed all that.

Tease Hair Salon, which recently opened on the stretch of Columbia Street known as The Landing, is not your mother’s beauty parlor and it has about as much in common with your father’s barbershop as Taylor Swift does with Minnie Pearl.

Tease may be the first full-service salon in the region that counts alcohol among its services.

Tease is divided into two sections. The front part of the shop is devoted to the sort of styling stations one would expect to find in a salon. But the back part resembles a bar inside a trendy eatery.

Tease is the brainchild of Shelly Choinski, who said she started working in area salons almost a decade and a half ago when she was 16.

Choinski’s previous styling gigs made her long for something less conventional, she said.

“In every salon where I have worked,” she said, “you had to be quiet. I appreciate the value of having a peaceful atmosphere. But I want this place to be fun. If one of my stylists hears her favorite song on the radio, I want her to dance.”

Choinski, who was born in Hawaii but grew up in Churubusco, wants to cultivate the sort of workplace where it is more common for employees to beg to come in to work than to call in sick.

One thing must be made perfectly clear at this critical juncture in the column: The bar is open only to clientele of the salon.

“If you see a bunch of hot chicks in here hanging out,” Choinski said, “you cannot just come in here and have a beer. You can, however, come in and get a haircut.”

Choinski hopes to add a martini menu soon, on which a prominent feature will be a “Tease-a-tini” that has not yet been devised.

But alcohol should not be misinterpreted as a focal point, Choinski said.

It is just one of the salon’s many “add-ons,” Choinski said, “like the Malibu treatment.”

The phrase “Malibu treatment” scared the columnist for some reason, so he chose instead to ask about the scalp massages.

Scalp massages are no add-on. They are given to every patron.

In the days when barbers were also surgeons, a hairdresser’s offer of a scalp massage would have been met with some resistance.

But a Tease scalp massage can turn a person who never gave much thought to his scalp into someone who comes to believe that an unmassaged scalp is the source of all of his – and, perhaps, the world’s – problems.

Only time will tell if the women of Tease will join the ranks of the best hairdressing, bartending, scalp masseuses who have ever held a flat iron in one hand and a martini shaker in the other.

It would be foolish to be against them because they are “fierce women,” Choinski said.

“I love to surround myself with strong, independent women,” she said.

Tease Hair Salon is not the only fresh venture that promises to return the Landing to its heyday of hipness.

A chicken wing restaurant that transforms on the weekends into a video bar has been in the works for quite a while.

Tease shares its building with the long-gestating restaurant/nightspot.

Choinski hopes to establish a relationship with this new business so they can explore some cross-promotional possibilities.

She sees a day when the Landing once again becomes a nexus of trendy happenings.

“I would love for that to happen,” she said, “for Columbia Street to come alive again.”

As for those aforementioned fierce women, Choinski must be counted among their number.

“I like to say that I get what I want,” she said. “If I want something, I try to get it the hardest I can. So far it’s gone really well. We’re here, aren’t we?”