Introduction

Craig Hunt started cutting hair very young out of necessity. Like many boys and men in his predominantly black community, he needed frequent haircuts to maintain his preferred style, but his family could not afford biweekly trips to the barbershop. The solution was for his mom, another relative, or a neighbor to cut his hair. Eventually, he picked up a pair of clippers and started cutting hair himself, becoming a “neighborhood barber.” Craig had found his calling. Today, Craig is the owner of two successful barbershops in the Des Moines area. Across the two shops, he employs around 20 people. Craig is also an educator who welcomes apprentices in his shops.




Craig Hunt
Iowa-based barber and educator

But it has not been an easy road. To legally practice his craft for pay, Craig had to get government permission in the form of an occupational license. This meant fees, exams, and—notwithstanding his years of experience—2,100 hours of expensive schooling. 1 Craig first attempted to fulfill these requirements in 1997. He estimates he completed 1,500 hours of the barber program, but he was young and could not put off earning a living. So he dropped out without finishing. More than a decade later, he decided to try again, assuming he would get credit for the 1,500 hours he had already completed. He did not. As he tells it, “They said my hours didn’t count. They just wanted to get the money out of me.” But Craig kept at it, redoing the program in its entirety and getting his license in 2015. Despite this, Craig feels lucky. When he first attended barber school, he paid about $5,000. Aspiring barbers in Iowa today are likely to pay quadruple that amount or more. 2

Craig has seen many other neighborhood barbers give up on becoming licensed—or never even try—due to the high costs in both time and money. These individuals have either opted to work as underground barbers or pursued a different occupation altogether. And this predicament isn’t unique to barbers. Kristin House, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based nail technician and educator with over a decade of industry experience across three states, sees the same patterns among manicurists. According to Kristin, who has worked as a beauty school instructor and an in-house trainer for salons, many manicurists start out as “in-house techs,” providing unlicensed services from their homes. Often, they build their clienteles through word of mouth, but customers also find them on social media apps like Instagram and TikTok, where nail content is popular. When they eventually pursue licensing, many in-house techs are frustrated by the cost and poor quality of the schooling required for licensure and stay underground or choose different careers.


Kristin House 
Oklahoma-based nail technician and educator

Among low- and middle-income occupations, barbers and manicurists, along with cosmetologists and skin care specialists, are some of the most widely and onerously licensed. These beauty and personal care occupations are licensed by every state and the District of Columbia—and often quite burdensomely so. In the third edition of the Institute for Justice’s License to Work, barber and manicurist rank as the 6th and 11th most widely and onerously licensed among 102 lower-income occupations. 3 Licenses like these come with high costs for aspiring workers. And, in one way or another, many of those costs are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Proponents justify the costs of licensing with appeals to public health and safety, arguing that licensing protects us from incompetent or unscrupulous service providers. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence finding that licensing uniquely bolsters health and safety. And very little prior research has explored the question of whether licensing influences health and safety with respect to the manicurist and barber occupations.

For this study, I used granular, firm-level health inspection data from nail salons and barbershops, and a research design that takes advantage of variation around state borders, to get to the heart of this unanswered question. Negative health inspection outcomes are a common measure of public health and safety risks. So if it is true that licensing or more stringent licensing burdens are necessary to protect health and safety, then businesses in states that do not mandate licensing or that have lower licensing burdens should exhibit more negative inspection outcomes—like health and safety violations or failed inspections—compared to businesses in states that do mandate licensing or that have higher licensing burdens. For manicurists, I compared inspection outcomes from 2017 to 2018 for nail salons in a then-unlicensed state (Connecticut) with those for nail salons in a neighboring licensed state (New York). The same type of comparison—that is, licensed state versus unlicensed state—was not possible for barbers. So for that occupation, I compared inspection outcomes from 2014 to 2018 for barbershops in neighboring states with disparate licensing requirements that represent the lower (Alabama) and higher (Mississippi) ends of the range.

The results suggest that licensing and licensing burdens have no substantive impact on health and safety risks to the public from manicurists and barbers. These results undercut a core argument in favor of licensing.

The results suggest that licensing and licensing burdens have no substantive impact on health and safety risks to the public from manicurists and barbers. Indeed, they suggest that, if anything, licensing and licensing burdens may slightly increase risks. These results undercut a core argument in favor of licensing. And together with other research, they suggest licensing burdens can be reduced or eliminated without harming the public.