As a result men have had an awful time of it, sitting in salons on a Saturday morning, scary smells stinging their nostrils, endless chatter ringing in their ears, hoping none of their mates see their sorry red faces among overhead hair dryers, wash basins, two-year-old fashion magazines and women with tinfoil squares hanging around their ears.

JB, who recently opened a men's barber shop, discovered as a youngster what men needed from a hair cut. He began by cutting his own hair after his mother Marie-Cleo Lazaro handed him his first pair of clippers when he was 14.

"I started doing my brother's, then all my friends, all in the garage. It had a good vibe in my garage, and I thought it would be nice to have a shop like this, where people come and hang out, tell stories, whatever," says JB. His full name is Juan Brian Edwards. He's always been called by his first two initials, and hence we have 'JB the Gentleman's Barber'.

At age 20 he has started his own business, setting up across the road from Belconnen bus interchange on Benjamin Way.

"I always like the traditional way a barber shop originally worked, the hot towel, shave, the fit-out. In Canberra it was hard to find different shops that could provide these sort of services," says JB.

JB does hot towel shaves, head massages and specialises in grooming beards with the finest beard oils he could find. Chesterfield lounges sit on a herringbone timber floor, creating an atmosphere where gentlemen can entertain one another. Cutting hair is the tip of the iceberg.

JB has seen enough gangster movies to know the original protocol of barber shops. Although his target market is the refined men who get off buses at Belconnen and frequent the Commonwealth public service departments, he'll accept shady-looking characters too.

"Obviously I'd help them out, give them a shave, I'm not going to turn them away," JB says, throwing a furtive look about the place.

"It is an environment where men can come in, it is their own time, they just go with the boys. Whatever is said in the barber shop stays in the barber shop. It never leaves."

JB's 16-year-old brother Gerald, another rising barber, has been working alongside him during the school holidays and will join him later, bringing the number of "cutters" to three, enough to take phone bookings as well as walk-ins.

"Towards the end of the year [the new venture] was running all right. I was run off my feet," he says.

"January is pretty slow, but I'm still kicking along," says JB in between cuts.