LEWISTON — Hair stylist Wendy Pelletier figures she glimpses parts of folks they’ll never see themselves.

“Nobody’s going to look at the scalp the way we do,” said Pelletier, who works at Campus Cutters in Lewiston. “We stand over people. They’re sitting lower. We have bright lights over us.”

Every now and then, she spots something scary, a lump, bump or mole that looks wrong. At least once, she has alerted someone to cancer.

“It was caught early enough, and it was on the surface enough that everything turned out fine,” said Pelletier, herself a cancer survivor. “She came back in and said, ‘Oh, my God, Wendy. Thank you so much.'”

It’s an instance that a new program — to be held May 6 at the Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Hope & Healing — hopes to repeat. The free, three-hour program is called “The Skinny on Skin.”

The Melanoma Foundation of New England created the seminar after researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health floated the notion of certifying massage therapists, hair stylists and other workers who come into close contact with the public.

They can ring cancer’s warning bell and potentially catch problems early, said Deb Girard, the foundation’s executive director.

This year, doctors will diagnose about 3.5 million skin cancer cases, she said. About 10,000 people will die from melanoma. Many would be saved if the problem were spotted early.

“The issue is, ‘How do you get things seen quickly?'” Girard said.

Local hair stylists say they’re already looking for problems beneath their customers’ hair and they look forward to learning more.

You don’t look at your head all the time, said Alison Roberge of Tagli Hair and Nail Salon in Lewiston. “You can’t see behind your neck. Who know’s what’s there? We do,” she said.

Audrey Martin, who works with Pelletier, said she was taught to examine scalps when she was in hair school.

“If I see anything abnormal, I tell them to go see a doctor,” she said. “We could be saving their lives. That’s the way I look at it.”

As a baby, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She was diagnosed again when she was in the eighth grade.

“Now, they can’t kill me,” she joked.

If she can better learn to spot dangers or warn people, she’s willing, she said.

“You just say ‘cancer’ and I’m there,” she said.

Pelletier, who was diagnosed with melanoma as a teenage girl, said she too hopes to learn more.

She knows people can be helped. The woman she alerted went to her doctor and left thankful.

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For more information on a free program on spotting skin cancer, go to the Dempsey Center’s website at www.dempseycenter.org or the Melanoma Foundation of New England at mfne.org.