Is the person cutting your hair qualified?

I do not know how prevalent the practice is, but many local authorities have made byelaws making it an offence to operate a hairdressing or barber’s establishment without a licence and they carry out inspections to check that the arrangements are safe and that they satisfy health and environmental requirements. Maybe this only applies in metropolitan areas. It probably does not include any checks on the qualifications or competence of the practitioners.

There is no reason why the Hair Council or any other body cannot set up a registration scheme that requires hairdressers and barbers in membership to have a minimum qualification, together with a complaints procedure and a disciplinary code. There are hairdressing NVQ’s and plenty of training courses so the groundwork is there. It would probably have to be a voluntary scheme, although non-registration could have commercial implications as it is a highly competitive business and customers might be more likely to be drawn to the “approved” establishments. However, on the other hand, given the cut-throat (!) nature of the trade, there would probably be resistance on the part of firms [and especially solo practitioners] to paying an annual membership fee that would cover the high cost of regulating the industry. Most hairdressers in salons seem not to be employees but they rent a chair by the week and transfer to other premises as and when it suits them – frequently taking their “own” customers with them. Keeping an eye on these shifting sands would be quite daunting for any regulatory body.

Incidentally, plumbers are not required to be registered [unless they do gas plumbing] or to have any specific ulaifications. More to point, even people who work in the catering industry do not have to have any qualifications apart from a food hygiene certificate which is very basic and which even I could probably achieve without formal instruction.

I have no idea whether myexcellent Italian hairdresser has any formal qualifications. He has been practising for over forty-five years and has been looking after my mop very satisfactorily for over ten years. He has only just raised his prices for the first time in four years and he teaches the younger hairdressers who serve in his establishment how to do a good job, so even if he is not avialable I know I will still get a good haircut. It’s the only place I know where I can enjoy a good conversation about holidays that doesn’t waste any of my time [one of the other “chairs” is permanently set on the soccer channel so I try to avoid that one!].

Bad hair cuts have never killed anyone (we can all look at our old photos and laugh at the fact that we are the living proofs of this), but massive allergic reactions to hair dye have killed from time to time.

I’m not certain that being college or Auntie Susie-trained makes a difference if hairdressers don’t test customers for allergic reactions, which isn’t a difficult process that you don’t have to learn in college but does take a couple of days to complete. In my experience, it just isn’t carried out unless you ask for it yourself. Unfortunately there is evidence of harm caused by hair dye in many medical records, although deaths are rare.

What sort of regulation are we talking about, one that would include systematic and mandatory allergy tests before any hairdresser applied hair dye? What would the argument be against that if it avoided death, or at best a bad rash, or something in between such as a swollen face and completely closed eyelids? Also, it isn’t because you didn’t have an allergic reaction the last time that you won’t get one this time. And if I were a hairdresser maybe I would welcome the cover provided by such a regulation?