Would you get your hair cut by an unlicensed barber?

While a lot of people might not even know that barbers have to be licensed (they have in Indiana since 1937), a proposal to kill the requirement has some barbers and those that train them in an uproar.

In 2010, the state legislature, looking for ways to reduce government regulation, appointed a committee to review 35 different boards that the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency oversees.

One recommendation that has emerged is a proposal that the State Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners be eliminated.

According to current state law, in order to be a barber or cosmetologist, a person has to have 1,500 hours of training and pass a test in order to be licensed. That’s an expensive process. Beauty schools and barber schools charge up to $12,000 or more for the training and materials.

In an age when many people are calling for less government regulation, one might expect that the plan to let the industry regulate itself would be welcomed.

The people I’ve spoken to, though, don’t feel that way at all.

“Services would most likely suffer, especially sanitation,” said Jeff Hey, one of the owners at the Hair Barn on Bluffton Road and a barber instructor at Ravenscroft Beauty College. “Not requiring people to go to school is not good for the industry.”

Hey said safety and health are the big concerns.

“We use a lot of sharp instruments – scissors, clippers, trimmers” that can cut people, he said.

When you remember that barbers and hairdressers cut the hair of people with hepatitis and HIV and other ailments, sanitation is especially important, and that’s a big part of barber training.

Hey acknowledged that he’s probably prejudiced. He’s in the education business in addition to being a barber, but he says most barbers and cosmetologists will say they had to go to school to become barbers and others should, too.

Shelly Hayes, assistant administrator at Rudae’s School of Beauty Culture, was even more adamant than Hey.

“There would be no regulations on sanitation,” Hayes said. “It would have a huge impact on safety and health.

“Some products you can’t buy without a license,” including disinfectants that kill fungus, bacteria and viruses, Hayes said.

That does raise the question: If the licensing requirement is dropped, how will barbers be able to buy some of the products they need?

Hayes said just about everyone she has spoken to favors licensing and says an online petition has been started on Change.org demanding that the licensing process remain.

John Graham, dean of the school of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, was on the committee that recommended eliminating the barber board. He said they met twice with the licensing board, which hands out 25 different kinds of licenses, to learn why the board was important.

Graham said professionals themselves want more stringent licensing requirements, but he said the literature shows that the requirements restrict entry into the profession. There isn’t good evidence that the public enjoys any benefit, he said, but it does appear to increase the cost of services.

There are ways to establish and enforce things such as hygiene standards that involve the industry itself, Graham said, “and not fees and criminalization” and involvement of Indiana’s attorney general when someone files a complaint against a barber or cosmetologist. Besides, most complaints don’t involve injury to a customer, but one barber complaining that another isn’t licensed, Graham said.

Now, though, it’s up to the legislature to decide whether it wants to do anything.

The concerns barbers bring up, admittedly, don’t occur to most people. The big worry when you get your hair cut is, how will I look.

As a guy who’s gotten a lot of bad haircuts, I know a license doesn’t guarantee you’ll look good.