It was a quiet morning as McMillan Crevitt sat her client in the chair and prepared to shape some shaggy locks.   ///  Crevitt has been a hair stylist for almost two years, and works at her mother Cindy Crevitt’s shop, Southern Barber and Style on U.S. 61 South. It’s a job she said she enjoys. But that wasn’t always the case.

“In the beginning, I hated hair, because I was born and raised in this shop,” she said, as her scissors snipped small clips of hair.
“I used to swing from the wall right there,” she said, pointing to a northeast corner of the shop. “I was in a bouncy chair. I did not like it (cutting hair).”
“She was not going to cut hair,” Cindy Crevitt said.
“Everybody was, ‘Are you going to do hair? Are you going to follow in your mother’s footsteps?’ No. I wanted to stay away from hair.”
What changed her mind was a facial from Jessica Downey, a former employee at her mother’s shop, that got her interested in skin care. “I fell in love with skin,” she said.

“Once I found out how it (a facial) made your skin glow and how it made you feel like new person, I found a school where I could (learn to) do it for a living, was licensed to do hair, skin and nails,” she said.
“She kept helping the other students with problems with their hair,” her mother said.
Working as a hair stylist has its ups and downs, Crevitt said.
A style shop conjures up a room full of women in various stages of having their hair shampooed, permed and cut, but Crevitt said the shop has its share of male customers, who become regulars after they get over their initial visit.
“If you treat them special, they’ll come back,” she said. “Instead of just buzzing their hair, we wash it, and after we wash it we put menthol on the hair and it makes the follicles stand up so we make sure we get every hair, and after that a massage. Men like to be pampered.
“They’re reluctant at first, but once they get to know us, they sit back and let us do our thing,” she said. “They love us.”

When Crevitt cuts hair, she does it sitting down in a wheeled office chair — practice suggested by her mother and a co-worker. “They said this was going save my back, and I can see the neckline better. I’m on the customer’s level; I’m not looking down.”
The shop’s busiest day is “Tuesdays, because we work late on Tuesdays. Teachers work so late now, and they can’t make it (during normal business hours). We stay late every day because we like what we do. If I didn’t like what I do, I’d be running out of here at 5:30.”
And the holidays are busy.
“Men are going out of town, and want to look good for their families, and then there are the parties,” she said.
At Christmas, “skin care is booming, because men will come in and their wives (gift certificates for) facials. They can do a one stop shop — get their hair cut and get their wife a Christmas present.”
Crevitt said the life of a stylist starting out is difficult because it takes time to build a clientele and slack periods can get boring. What made it easy for her, she said, is her background growing up in her mother’s shop.
“I got an idea of what to expect,” she said, adding because she can also do hair and nails, she is constantly busy with different activities.
Crevitt said she’ll eventually take over her mother’s business.
“I’m going to buy it from her … (but) no time soon. It will be a while.”