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Comment by sky-kedge0749 | Hacker News Reader

You still need some licensing to ensure people understand the basics, like hygiene, since everyone has an interest in making sure hairdressers won't spread lice or accidentally cut their customers with dirty tools.

Most of the money in hairdressing is in the complicated stuff. People do this because they want to make a career of it. Maybe you're imagining some kind of two week training program which outputs someone who does nothing but run a clipper over people's heads all day for $5 each. The economics and incentives for that don't make sense to me. People who want ultra cheap cuts will probably just buy their own clippers anyway.

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There aren't people regularly dying or winding up in the ER in states that don't require 10 months of expensive training to cut hair, so there is obviously a more reasonable line to draw.

Every state has similar requirements: https://beautyschoolprograms.com/cosmetology-licensing-requi.... Anyway no one is going to die or go to the ER from lice or getting their ears nicked or a mild chemical burn. We still don't want that to happen.

A lot of the training is hands-on. It's a trade school. You're not spending a entire month studying the theory of scissors, you're spending a lot of that time working on many customers under supervision. Even a simple haircut for a man might take a professional 20 minutes. A more complex cut can take longer. A student can take twice as long as a professional. It all takes time. It's a lot of work. I don't know what you can cut out without reducing quality. The fact that all states have converged on similar requirements supports that.

I am suggesting that it should be the government's business to ensure hygiene and Public Safety, but not prevent crappy haircuts

To check that someone can give a haircut safely you have to check that they can give a haircut at all, which means the haircut needs to be at some minimal level of quality.

How do you come to that conclusion. Seems entirely unrelated

If you can't give a haircut then you can't give a safe haircut.

Specific example: most people expect a basic haircut for a man to trim around the ears. If I never trim around the ears then maybe I'm being safe, but you can't say I give a safe haircut because I'm not even giving a haircut as most people expect it. In particular I'm avoiding one of the most dangerous parts. You need to watch me trim around the ears in a minimally correct way to make sure I know how to do it safely.

But you don't have to do a good job to do a safe job.

You can give an absolutely crappy haircut in a perfectly Safe Way.

I don't think you'll be able to convince me that someone needs 1500 hours of training to give a buzz cut.

I also don't think you can convince me my barber needs to be able to do every possible hair procedure in order to give me a buzz cut

I never said a good job, I said a minimally correct job. You can't evaluate whether someone can trim around the ears safely if their haircut is so bad they don't trim around the ears at all. I'm not sure how else to say it.

I'm not trying to convince you that a hairdresser needs 1500 hours of training to give a buzz cut.

I'm not trying to convince you that your barber needs to be able to do every possible hair procedure to give you a buzz cut. We could have barbers who are only licensed to do buzz cuts. We don't have them though because no one wants them to exist, not the barbers, schools, salons, public or government. Consider that being a barber who only gives buzz cuts is like being a programmer who only writes web-scraping scripts on freelance sites. They could exist though, theoretically.

>We don't have them though because no one wants them to exist, not the barbers, schools, salons, public or government. Consider that being a barber who only gives buzz cuts is like being a programmer who only writes web-scraping scripts on freelance sites. They could exist though, theoretically.

We don't know that because it is illegal. Most men cut use Clippers and scissors. There are businesses that operate all day doing these haircuts. You can teach someone how not to cut an ear off, poke an eye out with scissors and clippers very quickly. There is no regulatory middle option. Even if there is no demand, there could still be a regulatory middle option.

From https://beautyschoolprograms.com/cosmetology-licensing-requi... you can see that some states have licenses available with lower requirements. Two examples from the link:

* Idaho has "Barber – Barber-stylist 1800 hours; Barber (no chemicals) 900 hours"

* Wyoming has "Barber – 1250 hours with chemical services, 1000 without chemical services"

Maybe 900 or 1000 hours still seems like a lot to you, I don't know. Given the politics of these states it's unlikely their governments are being strong-armed by labor cartels or over-regulating on general principle.

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