ANDERSON, S.C. (AP) Snaz-Z is not unlike the beauty shops found in most Southern towns, a place where the regulars stop in to get their weekly hairdos, read magazines under the dryers and catch up with their friends.
Except this salon isn't decorated with wall-to-wall pictures of hairstyles. It's filled with posters and pamphlets about breast cancer. And the owner encourages customers to do a self-exam each month and get a mammogram every year.
"I felt that if I could just help one woman from dying from breast cancer, it would be all worth it," says shop owner Mary Louise Fant, whose aunt died from the disease in 1988.
Snaz-Z is part of a program called Beauty and the Breast, which uses the intimate atmosphere of salons in the area to help spread information about a disease that kills 40,000 American women a year.
Fant said early detection could have saved her Aunt Leila, who hadn't seen a doctor in more than 15 years when she was diagnosed. She said her mission is even more important considering most of the salon's customers are black women.
"Black women are very nurturing," she said. "We don't take care of ourselves because we're taking care of everybody else."
Black women develop breast cancer at a lower rate than white women but die at a higher rate, said Kathryn Smith, who founded Beauty and the Breast in January. It now reaches about 600 women in Anderson through 14 hairdressers and eight salons.
Smith said Fant has proven to be a great representative for the program.
"She knows how bad this can be," Smith said. "She's got a really good, close relationship with her customers and really cares about them. And it shows."
Fant goes from woman to woman - washing, cutting and styling - talking about the weather, the town, how her nieces and nephews are growing up. She tells one woman, whose hair is being scrubbed in the sink as her son sits in her lap, how beautiful her locks are. Then she tells another that she really should get a yearly clinical exam and rattles off statistics linking breast cancer and black women.
Fant knows who goes to the doctor and, more importantly, who doesn't.
"I say, 'Have you had your mammogram?' and I present the book that they can look over under the dryer," she said.
Information about breast cancer fills the pages. Customers get goody bags about early detection. Fant said she knows her customers pass on the information they get from her, saving more lives by sharing the message.
Forty-two-year-old Sharon Davis has been a customer of Fant's for years. Davis' sister hid her illness from the family for more than a year. She died of breast cancer in 1988.
Davis said her sister might not have kept the secret if she had met Fant.
"I think a lot of African-American women don't take time out," Davis said. "It is a constant reminder as soon you come into Louise's shop."
A $10,000 grant from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation funds the Beauty and the Breast program. It is modeled on a program started in other states years ago called Operation Beauty Shop, and on a Columbia prostate cancer program run by barbers.
Smith first challenged area hairdressers to talk to 50 women about breast cancer during the year. "Louise talked to 50 women in two weeks," Smith said.
The second phase of Beauty and the Breast is getting women to sign up for a clinical trial comparing two drugs that may reduce the occurrence of breast cancer in women.
Fant encourages her customers to apply so black women are represented in the study.
"The relationship that a beautician has with her clients is the right atmosphere," she said. "We talk about any and everything. It's just easy to talk about."
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