Some criminals rob, plunder and destroy. Others beautify. Hawaii hairstylists, makeup artists and shampooers all break the law when they work without state approval. So do natural hair braiders.
They all need government permission to work. Without clearance, the beauty police could issue fines of up to $100 per day and send them to jail if they teach, advertise or practice their specializations for pay.
Unfortunately, getting the right piece of paper is not easy in Hawaii. Manicurists must spend 350 hours in school, pass a state exam and pay recurring fees. Makeup artists and skin care specialists need 600 hours of training. Hairstylists, shampooers and braiders need 1,250 hours. Barbers need 1,500 hours. Cosmetologists need 1,800 hours.
Many beauty professionals are self-taught. They learn their occupations at home, and have little need for formal schooling. Hawaii beauty schools often treat niche services like braiding as an afterthought anyway. Yet the state demands enrollment. The arbitrary requirement is just one hurdle in a state with thousands of restrictions on honest labor in dozens of industries.
“License to Work,” a new report from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, examines 102 lower-income occupations and finds that Hawaii has the highest average burdens across the occupations it licenses. Taking into account the large number of occupations it licenses relative to other states — 64 of 102 — Hawaii ranks as the fourth most widely and onerously licensed state.
Only Nevada, California and Virginia have worse combined scores. Yet rather than scale back on the interference, Hawaii is moving in the wrong direction.
Although the state recently eased the burden for emergency medical technicians, it added requirements elsewhere. Regulators created a new midwife license in 2019, for example, while raising fees for other licenses. Beauty professionals face some of the most onerous requirements.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Five times since 1980, Hawaii’s Office of the Auditor has studied whether the beauty industry needs licensing at all. Each time, the answer has been the same: No. Rather than follow the evidence, Hawaii has chosen to ignore it.
State regulators set aside the data — gathered though independent reviews that are among the most rigorous in the nation — and focused instead on hypothetical threats. In other words, they couldn’t point to actual health and safety risks to justify beauty industry licensing, so they invented alarmist scenarios that rarely or never occur in real life.
Following the most recent audit in 2001, for example, the Hawaii Board of Barbering and Cosmetology warned that delicensing beauty professionals could “open the door to fraud, incompetence, and public distrust in barbers and cosmetologists.” The doomsday predictions sound scary.
The problem with this rhetoric is that other states have tested delicensing in real life — at least within the realm of specialty occupations. California and Texas completely exempt natural hair braiders from licensure. Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi and Nebraska recently delicensed makeup artists. And Missouri, Tennessee, New Hampshire and West Virginia recently delicensed shampooers.
Overall, braiders may practice without a license in 32 states, makeup artists in 14 states, and shampooers in 18 states. Salon visitors remain safe in all of these jurisdictions. During the first 10 years after Mississippi delicensed braiders, for example, the state received zero complaints related to health or safety.
Time after time, the predicted chaos never materialized when states set beauty professionals free. Hawaii had the research to predict this outcome decades ago, but nobody listened.
State lawmakers will have a chance to correct the error in 2023. If they are too timid to repeal all barbering and cosmetology licenses — as the Office of the Auditor recommends — then they can take an important step in the right direction with legislation that would exempt natural hair braiders, makeup artists and shampooers from occupational licensing.
People with valuable skills finally would be free to create beauty in Hawaii without the risk of criminal prosecution.
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Jessica Poitras is an attorney and Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va.
