In the barbering business, the old will eventually become new again, provided you have the patience to hang in there and wait out the change.

Gene Spearrin has witnessed a few tonsorial evolutions over a 40-year career in which he’s owned 17 barbershops from South Portland to Bangor. Not long after he started out in the early 1960s in Brunswick, short hairstyles seemed to grow longer overnight, causing older barbers everywhere to hang up their scissors and find a new line of work. But Spearrin stuck with it, adapting his skills to the new demands of the Beatles-inspired hair culture until other barbers started sending him all their unwanted mop-topped customers.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the long-hair trend,” said Spearrin, who now owns the Cornerstone Barber Shop in downtown Bangor, where business is good enough to keep seven barbers busily snipping away in shifts. “So many other barbers left the business in those years because they resisted change and wouldn’t learn the new techniques. I loved it.”

Yet there was one gentlemanly grooming tradition that not even a dedicated tradesman like Spearrin was willing to maintain through the decades – the long and leisurely straight-razor shave, finished off with a hot-towel facial.

The practice had already been fading fast when Spearrin was starting out, mostly because barbers back then no longer considered the few bucks they typically charged for a shave as a good return on the significant investment of time and materials it took to do the job right. And if they raised the price to make shaving profitable, they wondered, how many customers would be willing to pay the higher fee when they could just run electric or cheap disposable razors over their cheeks in the morning and call it good?

Then a few years ago, the tide seemed to turn yet again. Several of the Cornerstone’s customers started asking for shaves. They wanted a little old-fashioned pampering in their lives, and suggested that they’d be willing to pay upscale prices for the privilege.

“They weren’t the older customers, either,” said Spearrin, whose two daughters and son-in-law also share barbering duties at the shop. “They were from their mid-20s up to about 50, I’d say, professional people who might have remembered when they had a shave one time or young people who had missed out on the experience their grandfathers had and were curious about it. I was surprised at first. I’m a very practical person, and I really didn’t think there were people who would pay $22 for a shave that they could do themselves quickly at home. But there are.”

Confident of the demand for this new gentility, Spearrin is slowly reviving the long-dormant art of the barbershop shave. He’s converted a back room for the purpose, outfitting it with antique barber implements and tonics to provide a museum-like charm. Dozens of old hand clippers and straight razors in sterilizing cases share shelf space with new jars of lemon and cocoa butter after-shave creams, bottles of witch hazel and lotions scented with lilac and menthol.

At center stage sits the big, padded reclining chair, where a customer can doze for a half-hour while a barber deftly scrapes through hot lather to make his stubbled jowls smooth as a baby’s bottom. A mound of steaming hot towels and a fragrant facial massage tops off the movie-star treatment.

“We still use straight razors, of course, but the blades are disposable now,” explained Spearrin, who, unlike his predecessors, began honing his technique on real faces in barber college. “Before my time, they did lather balloons and shave them for training, but they weren’t necessarily the sharpest of razors.”

Although Spearrin has done a couple of appointment-only shaves recently, he doesn’t plan to advertise the unique service in his shop windows until the busy summer hair-cutting season is over. Not that a sign is entirely necessary to attract business. Word of mouth is spreading quickly, he said, and not just among the shop’s regular customers who are eager to take their places in the shaving chair.

“We’re already getting calls from people we don’t know who want appointments for a shave,” he said. “They see it as a luxury, I guess, as a unique and special way to pamper themselves once in a while. The idea of a professional shave may be old, but it’s new to them.”