Sara's Salon

Sara's Salon appears three times in Rockstar's Ultimate Edition material: a couple outside the shopfront, a man with a finished cut, and a client in the chair mid-appointment with a stylist working behind her. That's all three images, and Rockstar hasn't put a caption on any of them. The only words it has published about the place are in the Ultimate Edition listing.

What the Ultimate Edition listing says

The PlayStation Store's Ultimate Edition listing calls it Sara's Unisex Salon, and it's one of five Special Destinations the listing says are only open for business with the Ultimate Edition. It offers signature salon styles for both Jason and Lucia, including facial hair for Jason and makeup and nails for Lucia. Our Ultimate Edition guide has the rest of the list.

So it isn't a Lucia-only shop, and Unisex is right there in the name. It's also locked behind the twenty-dollar upgrade, which makes it a strange thing to have photographed three times.

Named after a person

Most of the businesses Rockstar invents are puns, brands, or both at once. This one's named after a person, which is how independent salons really do get named, and it quietly implies that somebody runs it.

Rockstar hasn't said who Sara is, whether she appears, or whether she's a character at all or just a name on a window. We're flagging it because this studio usually follows through on details like that.

Shown on Lucia

Lucia's screenshots carry most of the game's appearance work. Across the official set her hair changes again and again, and so do her piercings, jewellery and tattoo work.

Rockstar has historically demonstrated customisation on whichever character has the most looks, and here that's clearly Lucia. That's worth saying, because it also suggests the system wasn't bolted onto a male protagonist as an afterthought.

Jason isn't left out, though. The store listing gives him exclusive facial hair here, so the salon does both of them, even if the screenshots lean on her.

Barbers since San Andreas

San Andreas made you drive to a barber and pick from a board, and what you picked fed a tracked stat. Hair and clothing both counted toward CJ's respect and sex appeal, so the shop was wired straight into the game's numbers and didn't just sit beside them.

Grand Theft Auto V kept the shops and dropped the stat. You still drove to a barber, but whether you liked the haircut was up to you, and nothing downstream depended on it. Grand Theft Auto Online went further again and folded most appearance work into menus you could open from anywhere.

Naming a salon, photographing an appointment in progress, and putting a stylist in the frame with her hands in somebody's hair is a step back toward the San Andreas approach, where the place was part of the point.

Four appearance systems at once

Hair is one of four appearance systems Rockstar has shown now: tattoos, clothing, the gym and diet system that changes body shape over time, and this one.

Building all four at once is expensive, because each one has to work on top of the others. A haircut has to sit right on a body whose weight changes, for two characters, under every lighting condition in the game, and it has to keep sitting right while the body changes underneath it.

Changing your look after a job

Then there's the evidence system, where witnesses describe what they saw and the police match it against you. In a game where your appearance is evidence, changing it is useful for more than vanity, and a salon is one of the few places you can do that. Rockstar hasn't connected those two out loud, and it'd be a mistake to assume it has.

What isn't known

Most of it. The listing confirms both characters use it and names a few categories, but Rockstar hasn't described the actual options, put it in a district, said who Sara is, or confirmed that changing your hair does anything at all beyond changing your hair. We also don't know where standard edition players get a haircut, since this salon's listed as Ultimate only.

Related: tattoos, hair and clothing.