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Bradley Tuggle might be the closest thing the Triad has to a real-life Edward Scissorhands.

That is if the Johnny Depp character from the 1990 Tim Burton movie wore flashier threads, cut hair with a partner who looked just like him and enjoyed the hard rock stylings of bands like AC/DC, Mötley Crüe and Twisted Sister.

Tuggle, 32, likes to rock out, but he doesn’t play guitar, electric bass or even drums. Instead, the Greensboro resident’s instrument of choice is styling shears — four different kinds to be exact, which he keeps in a custom holster, called a stylist’s sleeve, on his forearm.

He and Australian stage partner Mickey Svircevic tour the country, demonstrating their inspired hair techniques in major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Blasting rock music when they hit the stage, they have impressed thousands of hair show attendees by cutting womens’ hair in tandem. While the music plays, the duo’s scissors fly, slashing tufts of hair from their models’ heads during guitar solos.

The most amazing part, however, is the way that Tuggle and Svircevic manage to radically restyle and shape a woman’s hair within the span of one song.

“The way we work onstage is totally out of the box, man,” says Tuggle, describing the dynamics the two share when they perform.
When Tuggle is not hitting the road, he styles hair five days a week at the Avanti Salon & Spa in High Point and Greensboro, which he co-owns.

With long, curly dark hair that extends more than half-way down his back, trimmed facial hair and tattoos that cover both of his arms, Tuggle might look like a hard rocker, but he has a rather gentle demeanor. He smiles a lot, and his voice sounds part country boy spiked with a twist of surfer dude. As for the tats, the stylist has an impressive one on his right forearm that appears to be a combination of stylist shears and a phoenix. On his left, there’s a large image of a woman and young boy embracing outdoors while their home is besieged by a storm.

“My mom’s got breast cancer, and I just got something to do with her,” Tuggle says, motioning to the tattoo which still requires two 12-hour sessions before it’s finished. “This is her and me as a kid.”

Family is important to Tuggle. His mother was an elementary school teacher, and his father was a high school principal in Guilford County, which may have influenced their understanding of Tuggle when he started listening to rock music as a kid.

“I think you are really open-minded after working with kids,” says Wayne Tuggle, Bradley’s father. “You know that young people go through phases and periods of time when you listen to a variety of things and that really didn’t bother me.”

At the time, Bradley Tuggle never would have guessed he would grow up to be a hair stylist, let alone cut women’s hair onstage in front of thousands of people. He was a regular, American teenage boy who played basketball in high school. Occasionally, he would use clippers to shave his fellow teammates’ hair in the locker room, but he did not find his calling until he started taking classes at Rockingham Community College.

“I tried to go to a community college and kept walking by the hair department the whole time, and I was like, 'You know what? This is what I want to do,’” Tuggle says. “It looked like it was fun, basically, so I started doing hair.”

Tuggle’s career choice might appear spontaneous, but his pursuit of hair care as a profession was more than just casual.

He immediately enrolled in Leon’s Beauty School where he studied the basic techniques of his trade with focus and dedication.

“A lot of times when my buddies were going out to nightclubs on the weekends, I would just stay at home and watch hair videos,” Tuggle says. “I wanted to be the best.

“I did not want anybody to be able to come inside, sit in my chair, and me not be able to take care of them.”

After finishing beauty school, Tuggle’s career as a stylist began interestingly enough. He opened a professional wrestling-themed barber shop in Eden, which was decorated to look like a wrestling ring. Because this took place during pro wrestling’s heyday of the late ’90s, the shop immediately took off.

His wrestling-themed barber shop was a hit, but it took Tuggle about two years to realize he didn’t want to cut men’s hair and talk about wrestling forever. He understood that to make real money in his industry, a stylist needed to cut women’s hair, something that would never happen so long as he had pictures of well-oiled grapplers on his walls.

“I got to the point, too, where I thought all men talked about was the weather or sports, and women have always got something else going on,” Tuggle says.

Shortly after Tuggle started cutting women’s hair at a salon in Eden, he began to perform demos at hair shows for the Wahl Clipper company. Even then, he describes himself as out of the box, grabbing handfuls of women’s hair and rapidly shaping and texturing it with clippers.

He says it was during one of these shows that he was discovered by billionaire mogul Farouk Shami, founder of the Farouk Systems line of Chi hair and skin care products.

“He took me for a limo ride to an airport, and we went to a little restaurant with me and one of the other top artists, and he told me he wanted me to join his company,” Tuggle says. “I had to go there to Houston, Texas, to try out, and I made it and it was like, 'You got the look, you got the style, and you got the image. Let’s get you workin’.’”

Shami recruited Tuggle to promote his products at national hair shows, and it was during his training with Farouk Systems that Tuggle met Svircevic, the other half of the hair platform artist team that would later be known as Mickey and Bradley. Tuggle says that he and the more wild and eccentric Australian were somewhat of an odd couple at first.

“I remember thinking, 'Man this is probably the craziest person that I’ve ever met in my life,’ I mean seriously,” Tuggle says. “Then they teamed us up one day on a show together, and the minute we stepped onstage, we had that chemistry.

“I had worked with two or three people before then, but we had an hour and fifteen minute show and I felt like I’d been there 10 or 15 minutes.”

“He’s the American version of me,” Svircevic says via telephone from his home in Canada. “When we’re onstage, we just have this connection and know what we’re going to do and exactly what we’re going to say.”

Because of the Australian heritage he shares with AC/DC, Svircevic is a huge fan of the band. Tuggle says his partner likes the group so much in fact that he’ll sometimes program too many songs from the group into their shows. He even listens to them in their hotel rooms when the duo is on the road.

“When we room together, he’ll be in the shower, I’ll hear him playing 'Back in Black,’ ” Tuggle says.

“And I’ll be like 'Mickey, we’re gonna have to listen to this 10 times today, and you’re starting it now. Chill out and give it a rest for a minute.’”

Aside from their rocking attitudes and high entertainment values, another factor that draws attention to the Mickey and Bradley shows from industry peers is their unique approach to cutting hair. Tuggle and Svircevic aren’t slow and careful; they are precise. And instead of combing a woman’s hair up in order to cut it, the duo shapes and textures most of a woman’s hair while it’s down –– or “falling” –– from a model’s head.

“Bradley and I are out to break the rules, but to break the rules, you have to know the rules,” Svircevic says. “So there’s a method to our madness.”

He later adds: “A lot of people break the rules, whether it’s speeding, giving the finger, or cursing, but when it comes to doing hair, for some strange reason they are so afraid to break the rules.”
Their approach has even earned them coverage in national hair publications, such as Modern Salon Magazine and American Salon Magazine.

Despite the fact that it is his living, Tuggle manages to stay focused on hair even when he’s off the clock. He can’t even sit behind someone on an airplane without thinking about ways to improve their hair. And while his friends and former basketball teammates might give him a hard time for being a stylist, he loves his job too much to care.

“I come to work and I love being here,” Tuggle says. “I love working with the girls who work here, they’re cool girls and we got one of the top salons in the area.

“You don’t see any salons that work like this.”

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com.