Letting down their hair

It's an unusually warm Sunday night and the upstairs room at Downey's in Society Hill is filled with partygoers lathered up and waiting for the entertainment.

A band? Too blah. A comic? How common.

No, these revelers are here to watch four hair stylists do improvisational cutting and styling. It's a natural match - the audience is made up mostly of their peers - but it's unusual because, instead of competing for clients, they are socializing.

"I think it's amazing. It's like a do-it-yourself event. Very, very inspiring," says Rene Quick, 31, a hairdresser with Lakshmi Hair Studio in Old City, as she intently watches the cutting on stage.

Stylists drinking and chattering with one another is not the norm in big cities, including Philadelphia, says Joe Berardi, the 26-year-old local stylist who last year started a hairdressers' social-networking group and Web site called Scissor Candy (www.scissorcandy.com) with help from colleague Juaquin Cameron.

They know hair secrets are competitive but they wanted to inspire a friendly camaraderie. What better way to recruit members, Berardi figured, than throwing parties about every six weeks - which just happens to be the usual interval between hair appointments.

Why Sunday night?

"Sunday is our Friday," Joe says of hairdressers, who usually don't work on Mondays. Setting the time at 9 p.m. draws a younger crowd, stylists unafraid of new ways to interact.

Thus, an Open Chair is their twist on the open-microphone nights that bars offer for musicians and comics.

Owners can get very protective of the stylists they nurture, especially those who evolve into big moneymakers. In the lingo, they have what's called a full book. If that stylist and his or her regular clients who are worth, say, $150,000 a year, walk out the door to another salon, good vibes are not left behind.

"My thought was competition is great, but it needs to be friendly competition," says Berardi, who styles at the Richard Nicholas Hair Studio near Rittenhouse Square.

Berardi's father is Nick Berardi, 60, owner of the salon and a 45-year industry veteran, so Joe has grown up around the business. Father and son remember the unexpected happenings during an event three years ago at a club where a nationally known hairdresser was giving a demonstration.

In the middle of it, yelling came from the back of the room. A woman had encountered a man from a salon she had departed. He said something about her move and "spilled" a fruity drink over her head, says Nick, who stepped in between them.

"In her cleavage was all the fruit," Nick laughingly recalls, picking his words carefully. Then, "she poured a drink over his head."

At Downey's last month, all of the drinks remained in the glasses or went directly down the drinker's throat.

On a stage at one end of the room were two chrome and black salon chairs, a table with tools of the craft, and pole lights all around to help with the photos and videos that Scissor Candy produces for its Web site. The audio and video production makes the stylists look like rock stars.

The hairdressers meet their clients a few minutes before the event and briefly find out what they want. Mostly, the models - volunteers who learned about the event through the Internet and other publicity - tell the cutters they are open to most anything, especially since their new style is free.

Christine Perez, 22, of Sofi's Colour Lounge in Cranford, N.J., is carefully cutting new lines on Kaitlin Crawford, a 23-year-old Art Institute of Philadelphia student.

"I'm so nervous you wouldn't believe it," Perez says. "I think I'm pretty good. My mom's a hairdresser, so I had a good teacher."

When the cut is done, Crawford agrees, and hugs Perez.

Lakshmi salon's co-owner, Danielle Carr, is nursing a sparkling water until it's her turn to go on stage.

"I wish they would have had something like this when I first started out," says Carr, 31. "There's all this young energy. It's more about hair as an art rather than 'we just cut hair.' "

Tyler Perrin, 25, who works at the Art + Science salon in Manayunk, heard about the event from a friend. Perrin likes studying other people's techniques so he can grow with that knowledge.

Scissor Candy and the Open Chair are still growing themselves. Though the organizers estimate that 100 people from a dozen salons were at their April event, some in the audience wandered upstairs from the bar below. Many stylists came from salons that had hairdressers on the stage.

But Joe Berardi is getting e-mails from stylists in other cities who want to start Scissor Candy chapters and Open Chairs. And the event at Downey's attracted a New York hair-product bigwig.

Albie Cortes, 44, vice president of sales for Bumble & bumble hair products, says there's nothing else like Joe Berardi's brainchild.

"I travel all over the country and I see the traditional barriers between salons actually stifling creativity and community," Cortes says. "This venue breaks down those traditional barriers."