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Also this issue: Icepack |
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June 13-19, 2002
naked city
 to your health: Duafeâs Syreeta Scott works on her clientsâ overall well-being, not just their hair. |
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On a quiet, sunny morning, the 900 block of South 17th Street, between Christian and Carpenter, is an unassuming place. The smell of cooking food is in the air as kids and adults go about their everyday business. The everyday of this block, though, also includes Syreeta Scott, the mistress of Duafe Holistic Hair Care, who, as we drive to meet her, is already tending to customers primed for the experience of old-school barber chairs, delicate Ashanti artworks and the wafting scent of coconut oil and incense.
Whether they want braids, plaits, natty or knotted rope locks, curly knobs, an intricate weave, simple cornrows, twists, double-coil twists or an uptown micro-braid, what they are really set for when they enter Duafe is the healing experience of Scott's all-natural approach to hair.
"Duafe," an Adrinka cloth symbol characterized by a comb, was once used exclusively by Ashanti royalty to mean "the embodiment of all the virtues of womankind, prudence and patience." Talking with Scott, that seems about right.
"People who come to me are people who want other options than perms," says Scott, just back from speaking at an International Association of African-American Music conference with the fashion-forward likes of Lloyd Boston. "These are people who care about the health of their hair and all that that entails."
Peeking down this block, it is not easy at first to find Scott's salon. Yet everyone, from Philly's finest musicians, like Jill Scott (no relation) and the members of Kindred, to out-of-towners like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, has found Duafe nestled behind its metal grating and the sign promising "Holistic Hair Care."
At age 27, Scott's been doing hair for 15 years, in business first at her mother's house, and at this location for three years.
"My mother did not know how to do my hair," she says with a laugh. "Since I didn't want to look all jacked up for school, I learned to do it myself. Suddenly everyone wanted to know who did my hair. Telling everyone, ŒMe,' was what started my career."
Her career, which keeps her working seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. (if not later), is making people comfortable in their skin -- from natural, free-flowing Afros to skin-close shaves -- after generations of fried hair perms and other chemical preparations. Scott builds relationships with her clients. This is what is most spiritual to her about her brand of hair care. "Holistic hair care is a whole approach to taking care of the self. It's about putting things in your hair that you would put, with ease, in or on your skin or in your mouth: aloe, mayonnaise, olive oil. Things that make your life so much easier -- so simple, it makes your life better."
But she also gently prods her customer base (more than 200 regulars who come about every 10 days to two weeks) to exercise for at least 15 minutes a day, to eat raw vegetables, to get colonics, to take vitamin B complex, to breathe and to avoid stress. "Stress can take out your hair, so find another approach to hollering," she says.
A great percentage of Duafe's clientele, at present, are there to get braided, to cultivate locks or to maintain such --a process that takes as much patience for Scott as it does for the wearer. "Getting locks is a challenge, a real process. It's definitely a relationship that we have to talk through. A lot. It takes three to six months just to get over a hump. Then another 12. If they want to talk about their locks -- their health, adornment, coloring -- I'm there for them."
Like her customers, Scott knows the difference between wearing "locks" and wearing their religiously born brethren, dreadlocks, the fifth-century Hindu braid popularized through Rastafarianism that signified, in its wearer, a singular devotion to the spiritual. This is not about trend. This is about culture and life experience. "In Africa, only the wise men and kings were once meant to wear dreadlocks. Dreadlocks are antennae to God. That's why, in reality, it takes so long to cultivate a mature lock: It shows that they have the patience and knowledge to attain a God-given gift," Scott says.
But the ever-jovial Scott is fine if you just want cool cosmetic locks.
She talks about the ever-changing fashionability of hair, from the brave souls who first wore braids to their everyday popularity to the neo-soul trend currently taking over the nation.
Mention her "celebrity" clientele -- Allen Iverson, Glenn Lewis, Floetry, Sonia Sanchez, Aries, or the overall styling of hair and clothes she does for Jill Scott -- and she giggles, not because she's hiding them. "I know people love to know about them and how they came to me." But Scott's work goes beyond the Benjamins and the glitter of starshine. With these celebs, as with anyone she works on, she gets to find out about people. How they talk. Who they are. What family means to them.
"I don't care whose hair I do or when," says Scott, who also teaches fashion hair care at Temple University, in a course called "Hair Stories." "I say hi to everybody I see. I love what I do. I live by example. I found my mission and my passion. And that's hair. That's what Duafe is all about."
Duafe Holistic Hair Care, 917 S. 17th St., 215-893-7890.
