What do you learn in 1500 hours? That's almost a year of work. I understand that surgeons apprentice for years, but what's the logic here?
- chemistry for mixing color (actually pretty complicated and depends from person to person. If you’ve ever gotten your hair colored, they have a record of your exact formula + notes).
- being able to look at random photos people bring in and reconstruct the cut on your head with your hair texture and curl characteristics.
- actually making you look good.
- learning how to use straight razor without slitting your throat.
- learning how to do all of this within a set amount of time to fit in more clients per day.
She made over $100k per year before we left the states. Her men’s cuts were like $40 or something, I’m not sure, I never paid for it, but it was more than $30. Either way, it is the best haircut I’ve ever had — she can spot “cheap” cuts a mile away (one of our first date talking points, actually). If you want to not look cheap from a distance, get a real haircut at a real barber or salon.
It took her nearly 15 years to get to that level, but she could name her price by that point and people would pay.
Straight Razor? probably should have training.
The other three? that's mostly practice. So why 1500 hours of training, and not like, 160, and have the rest be on the job?
You can only cut someone’s hair about once every six weeks, and you can’t undo a mistake. That person has to walk around with your mistake for weeks.
— my wife
But as a counterpoint, it looks like getting a tattoo artist license in Rhode Island requires only a health test and a few hundred dollars.
They all say that to establish confidence in their new client. Every time my wife goes to a new hairstylist, she comes home and says "she told me my last cut/color was horrible and I need to come back for more treatments".
My understanding is that stylists have to actually cut your hair several times to understand which parts grow faster than others and cut it in a way such that when it grows out it still looks good. I’ve definitely heard my wife tell new clients their previous stylist is excellent and ask why they are sitting in her chair, while she is flipping the hair around to reverse engineer how it was cut so she can attempt to replicate the cut.
According to my wife, “cheap” cuts don’t grow out well, the original shape isn’t held as it grows so it looks weird. If you aren’t just another body in a chair, iow, she knows how your hair grows, it will be cut so that it grows out and keeps it’s original shape.
Plus it’s people’s hair/beards which can have a profound impact on their appearance and thus their mental state.
All good reasons to train from “can succeed” to “cannot fail.”
Edit: Case in point: https://reddit.com/r/funny/comments/vdnocs/went_to_a_new_bar...
Somehow the rest of the states don’t have exploding gas stations problems.
Lawmakers must think we are like Zoolander
Yes, they need to be knowledgable (growth patterns/directions, skin issues that may cause complications, hair-loss aware haircuts), but 3-times the training as a police officer, really? To be a Rhode Island State Trooper, it is a "grueling" 24-week program... https://risp.ri.gov/academy/trooper
Maybe prior to the 19th-century, when barbers were also surgeons and dentists that would be a minimal amount of training - but that is no longer the case.
Not all of them are. Also, a company can sustain lawsuit differently and has access to better documentation to defend its products. Also, you're responsible to follow dosages when you apply them by your own, but the barber is when applying them on you.
This is a crummy comparison, because the problem isn't that barbers get too much training (maybe they do) but that police officers get very little training.
That doesn't mean they won't kill you -> try drinking bleach or pesticides for demostic plants, both avaliable at the nearest supermarket.
Barber chemicals can give you skin burns or render you partially bilnd. That's mostly female products though, being a men's barber is typically simpler.
that being said, most of UK has no special lisence for barbers -> just need to follow health and safety and have insurance.
Yeah, I think it should be easy.
I can play that game too:
"they train you not to touch things? Must be super easy, don't touch the thing."
"it's super easy not to touch the thing, we have to make chemicals touch people face safely, we don't have the luxury of just not letting the face not touch the chemical"
https://africasbesthair.com/wp-content/uploads/AB-Instructio...
You also need to know all the interactions between products, and between products and skin, and between product and skin in the context of the goal of the sitting client, which might want a color point in between two tints with reflex of another.
We're in a profession that requires next to no training (except for maybe an odd "leet code" test that has no relevance to our day-to-day work, though there are plenty of jobs that don't even need that.) Maybe we're spoiled.