Why did you enroll in beauty school? To follow your passion? You love doing hair, skin, nails, makeup or whatever. To express your creativity and talent? Of course, and get paid! To be your own boss? No one’s going to tell you what to do and when. To make clients happy? Their satisfaction means so much (but not more than money). To learn the laws and regulations governing the practice of performing beauty services for compensation in your state? Seriously doubt it, and that’s unfortunate.
Government, the aspect of the beauty industry that bores us most and we understand least, exerts the most control over our careers.
Sadly, beauty pros collectively don’t know much about how federal and state governments constrain our work. Why not? Because that undermines our industry’s portrayal of beauty pros as being creative and achieving their financial goals on their own terms, if only they have the motivation to succeed. On a more personal level, beauty pros reject the idea of limitations, whether perceived or real.
In managing our careers, we don’t want limits; we want control. However, we may often find ourselves feeling out of control, powerless over what happens to us. I want to empower you to think differently about your career and how you define success. There’s power in knowledge; undoubtedly, we learn a great deal in beauty school and even more afterwards through experience and exposure to other resources.
“Liberty is the right to do what the law permits” – Montesquieu
But more important, it’s our knowledge of power that gives us both the constraints and space to grow professionally. First, know that beauty pros operate within a highly regulated industry. In any given state, the state board issues individual licenses granting authority to earn compensation for performing beauty services while requiring compliance with applicable laws. In a very real sense, a licensee is merely a number, representing one person among thousands who qualify to hold a license. State boards consider every person who holds the same license as equal and only minimally competent; those who’ve held licenses for decades don’t have any more rights or privileges than those who earned the same license last week. Beyond compliance with health and safety regulations, state boards don’t care about quality of work.
Working within legal constraints does not limit our potential as much as it protects us from building our careers on a shaky, unstable foundation.
Beauty pros make excuses for not being compliant by bemoaning laws and regulations as impractical, difficult to follow and subject to unexpected change. None of that absolves our professional responsibilities. Many different federal and state agencies care very much that we meet our legal and financial obligations. Government power to enforce, inspect, investigate, audit, cite, fine, prosecute and punish should absolutely influence how you manage your career. Learn as much as possible about its formidable power and demands so you can make better decisions. For more information about what’s required by the government, check out these compliance resources.
An earlier version was published by Beauty Cast Network.