Jennifer McPhee
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (July 20/01) - Brian Pearce owns Yellowknife's only real barber shop.

It's a simple little shop in the Discovery Inn. You can't get a fake tan at Brian's and there aren't any fancy pictures of new fangled hairdos lining the walls.

Brian Pearce gives Thomas Suvissak a good, old-fashioned haircut. - Jennifer McPhee/NNSL photo

You also won't catch Pearce smearing mousse on to the heads of his customers. He uses an old fashioned set of clippers, talc powder and perhaps a touch of gel for the younger folk.

It's a manly place for manly men.

"I've seen women come in here to kiss their husbands," Pearce said.

"I tell them there's no kissing in the barber shop. They laugh, but I don't find it that funny."

There may be no kissing allowed, but there is a hefty stack of Maxim magazines in the waiting area.

"Guys come in here and ask where the girly magazines are," said Pearce.

"I tell them that little kids come in here. Maxim is the closest I can come."

Pearce said men come into his shop for a good, old fashioned haircut. And to unwind.

"They come here and they talk about things you can't really talk about in the company of both sexes."

Like what, for instance?

"The guys in their twenties like to talk about chasing women," he said.

"I've had a few Romeos come in here."

And what about middle-aged men?

"They are concerned about their financial status, about how to stabilize their lives," he said, adding that much older men have the best stories.

"They tell me about the history of Yellowknife."

Pearce hears more than his share of good gossip, but he doesn't pry into people's lives.

"I've learned not to do that. When you ask personal questions, you can make people feel uncomfortable," he said.

"You always go with how the customer feels."

Pearce was inspired to become a barber after being on the receiving end of a bad haircut.

"He didn't give me what I wanted and I was upset. I thought, I could do this better than you."

He cut hair in Halifax for 14 years before he opened his own shop in the Igloo Plaza. Last January, he moved it to the Discovery Inn Centre.

He's still working on the decor. Although he has the traditional red and white poll outside, he wants to bring in an old fashioned barber chair.

"The cadillac of all shop chairs," he calls it.

Pearce likes his job, but does admit that, despite their abundance of testosterone, his male clientele occasionally act like prima donnas.

"Sometimes people think that women are fussier than men, but it's not true," he said.