About — Vanessa Jackson
The salon is what happens when she stops borrowing chairs.
Jackson & Coil is the salon Vanessa Jackson spent seven years in Oslo not opening. This is how she got here, and what she promises to the chair.
Tottenham, kitchen, Saturday morning
Vanessa grew up in Tottenham, North London, the youngest daughter of Jamaican parents who ran a small Caribbean grocery on Bruce Grove. Her hair was 4a. Her grandmother did it every Saturday morning at the kitchen table — hot-comb on the gas hob, coconut oil, the smell of burned newspaper on the windowsill.
By the time she was sixteen she was doing the hair of every girl in her year for ten quid and a Lucozade. By eighteen she'd worked out that the thing she'd been doing for free at kitchen tables was a craft people in actual salons hadn't bothered to learn.
London, then New York, then back
She trained formally at Curl Bar London under Michelle Sultan. Then she crossed to New York for a year — the original Devachan, then a season studying with Anthony Dickey at Hair Rules. Two of the rooms where the modern art of curl-cutting was being written.
She came back to London with one clear opinion: that the binary the industry insisted on — Black hair in one shop, everything else in another — was a failure of craft, not of biology. Curl is curl. The technique is the same. The knowledge is the part you go and get.
“Every curl pattern is the same job done with knowledge — and knowledge is something you go and get, not something you wait for.”
Why Oslo, then
She moved here at 28 for a Norwegian boyfriend who didn't last but a city that did. For the next seven years she worked out of a borrowed chair at three different Oslo salons — quietly building a tightly-kept client list of women and men who'd otherwise have been on flights to London or Stockholm.
What she heard in those chairs, on repeat, in three languages: that nobody in this country sees this hair properly. Not really. Not at the level the hair deserves. The choice was either get on a plane every six weeks, or accept a haircut that wasn't quite right. Most people accepted it. Some cried in the car on the way home.
Jackson & Coil is the answer to that, in one room, on Markveien. The whole curl spectrum — Type 2A through 4C, women and men — done by stylists who actually trained for it. No kids' table. No referral up the road. No crying in the car.
What we believe
Three things we won't argue about.
Every curl pattern is the same job, done with knowledge.
The technique is the same. The training is the difference. We trained for all of it — Type 2A loose waves through Type 4C tight coils — and we don't have a 'specialist' page for some of it and a regular page for the rest.
We cut you for your curl, not against it.
Dry. Curl by curl. On the natural pattern. Wet-cutting and tension-stretching hide what the hair is actually doing — and that's exactly the part we need to see.
You leave knowing what was done and why.
Every appointment ends with a short education — the cut, the products, the technique you can actually recreate at home on a Tuesday morning when the salon is closed. No mystery, no dependency.
The room
Lean Scandinavian, warm where it counts.
Markveien 35. Cream walls, brass shelving, a single terracotta accent, plants, music in Vanessa's taste. Two chairs, a private styling room for clients who want one. The same playlist every visit, the same scent, the same coffee.
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