The Idaho State Capitol stood idyllically on a chilly January afternoon much like any other, but the house business committee meeting taking place within was anything but ordinary. The generally sparsely attended meeting now saw seats full of attendees, both observers and testifiers. A house bill with the potential to alter the future of cosmetology in Idaho was on the agenda – and it was certainly not going through without a fight.
If passed in its current state, the bill in question – House Bill 547 (formerly House Bill 513) – would reduce the number of education hours necessary to receive a cosmetology license from 1,600 to 1,000 and reduce the required apprenticeship hours from 3,200 to 2,000. At the house business committee meeting on January 27th, Idaho District 21 Representative Jeff Ehlers, the bill’s sponsor, claimed the lower hour requirement would help students start earning income faster and reduce their tuition costs.
“A police officer in Idaho is required to have about 1,100 education hours and then about a 40-hour training or apprenticeship after that. EMT, 120 hours of education with another 15 hours of apprenticeship,” he said. “… A commercial driver’s license in Idaho is somewhere between 48 to 120 hours of education, and then a concealed carry permit is only eight hours. So, I think that helps put some perspective when we’re saying we’re just lowering it down, the education hours, to 1,000 hours.”
Ehlers wasn’t alone in the creation of the bill. Alyssa Bowman, who owns 25 locations of SportsClips across Idaho and Utah, worked on it alongside him. She said the bill would lower the barrier to entry in the industry and that longer hours would not increase wages among graduates.
“From our perspective, the real skilled training starts when they hit our floors,” Bowman said at the committee meeting.
Opponents of the bill argue that lowering training hours would only produce less qualified cosmetologists and push the cost of training onto those that hire them.
“You know, this appears to be a race to the bottom to find out which state can produce the poorest qualified applicants, and it distresses me,” said Representative Richard Cheatum of District 28A. “I’ve heard stories of women going to cosmetologists and coming home with burned scalps and burned hair, and it concerns me when we’re dealing with the kind of chemicals and things that cosmetologists deal with.”
But the bill seemed to find support in Representative Brent Crane of District 13 despite Cheatum’s opposition.
“So you’ve got makeup, you’ve got nails, you’ve got perms, you’ve got colors, and you’ve got facials that you get under this license. All of those my 15-year-old teenage daughter does at home,” Crane said in a clip that went viral on social media. “I’m really struggling, to be candid, why this even needs to be licensed. A 15-year-old girl can do this – she’s never had a chemical burn, she changes her hairstyle all the time, she changes her nails all the time, she does facials frequently, but we’re telling people that you have to have, right now, 1,600 hours, in order to do this. A bad haircut can be fixed in two weeks, and a bad set of nails can be fixed in a month. I’m struggling with what is the necessity of even having 1,000 hours.”
Though the representatives of Idaho will make the final decision, the meeting set aside time for the public to provide input. Kelsey Crawford, owner of a high-end local salon in Meridian, Idaho, testified at the meeting that her three assistants said they would not have been ready to start work had their hours been cut to 1,000. Crawford said 200 to 600 of the 1,600 education hours are typically dedicated to theory, learning from a book with no hands-on training. If the requirement were to be cut to 1,000 hours, much of students’ time for hands-on and theory training would be eliminated.
“As we say in our industry, ‘The world thinks we play with Barbies,’ but until you really do it, you don’t understand the depth of the license and what it entails,” she said. “When we have to pass boards, we have to know things like the layers of the skin, the infections of a nail, the anatomy of the nail, the anatomy of the skin, the anatomy of the hair, how chemicals work, pH, chemistry plays a huge role. There’s so much more than what meets the eye to our license.”
Joshua Starita, the president of Paul Mitchell Schools North Star Group, also testified against the bill.
“…This bill will reduce access to the cosmetology license, not expand it. Federal Title IV funding is tied directly to program length. Reducing cosmetology hours from 1,600 to 1,000 significantly cuts the amount of aid students qualify for. That makes cosmetology school less affordable, especially for low-income Idahoans,” Starita said. “My colleagues and school owners from states that have made similar changes, like Texas and California, saw enrollment decline, not increase. Idaho salons already face a workforce shortage, and this bill will make it worse.”
House Bill 547 will only take effect in Idaho if passed, but it could have nation-wide implications. States like Texas, California, and Virginia have lowered their cosmetology hours to 1,000 in recent years – if Idaho joins their ranks, it could encourage lawmakers in other places to pursue the same change, especially in the face of tricky reciprocity laws that affect cosmetologists who want to practice in another state.
It could also call requirements from other professions in the beauty industry into question. Cosmetologists, nail technicians, aestheticians, makeup artists, and unlicensed hobbyists are often lumped together by the general public. Changing the requirements for cosmetology may, in turn, trigger a reexamination of other beauty professions’ curriculums.
But local cosmetologists have not been standing idly by; many have been calling representatives, showing up at meetings, and making social media posts to raise awareness. Crawford said in an interview with KTVB that she and other cosmetologists went as far as to stop Crane in the state house hallways to further discuss the bill and its consequences. Crane, who was interviewed by KTVB alongside Crawford, apologized for the comments he made at the meeting and said that his position has since been swayed by the conversations he had after the debate.
According to reporting by KTVB, the bill, which has been at a standstill, will be amended or rewritten entirely before it next hits the house floor – going to show just how powerful social media awareness and community action can be. In the meantime, cosmetologists are continuing to post and raise awareness about the bill, with a Change.org petition to stop the bill from passing garnering over 1,500 signatures in just six days.
It is clear that the members of the Idaho cosmetology community, and the cosmetology community at large, are waiting for the result with bated breath.
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