Beauty industry licensing restructure could affect over 60,000 workers statewide

SALT LAKE CITY — Major changes to the licensing structure for workers in the beauty industry could be coming to Utah, according to the Office of Professional Licensure Review, which presented a plan Thursday to be recommended to the state Legislature in the coming session.

The licensing review office, which was created by the Legislature in 2022, looks at every occupation in the state once every decade, according to director Jeff Shumway.

The review of the cosmetology industry, which was undertaken in the past year, generated a significant amount of interest from current license holders. In August, students from beauty schools across the valley protested during the Utah Legislature's Business and Labor Interim Committee meeting at the Utah Capitol.

The impact of these changes may be widespread. There are over 60,000 active licenses in that industry, according to the Division of Professional Licensing, one of the most common in the state. In comparison, there are around 56,000 active nursing licenses in the state and 33,000 contracting licenses.

A new presentation was given Thursday night, outlining a more finalized version of licensing change recommendations to around 400 online attendees, according to the review office.

The public input in the meeting was limited to written comments, which were not accessible to KSL.com at the time of article publication.

"The reason we have licensing is to make sure that significant harm to the public is regulated in some way," said Shumway. "Licensing is not really about the quality of the haircut that's being provided. It's about the safety of the haircut being provided."

The director said there were three major focal points his department's review found.

Public safety

Firstly, the hours spent on training don't necessarily correlate with a procedure's risk to the public, the review found.

"We realized that the training across the state is not always consistent and not always targeted to public safety," according to Jordan Gygi, who worked on the review. "Students in the state are trained excessively on low-risk services and insufficiently on high-risk services."

The recommendation will be to require a minimum number of hands-on repetitions for each service.

Consumer transparency

The second issue they identified has to do with licensing structure and transparency. Shumway said that there is significant overlap between a number of the licenses offered, which creates confusion among consumers.

"If I was a consumer, and say, wanted to get laser hair removal, there are four different license types that have within their scope of practice laser hair removal," Shumway said. "But it's going to be very unclear to me as a consumer what the training has actually been for you, what the license means you've had in terms of training."

The lack of transparency in training requirements "really undermines the purpose of licensing," according to the director, "which is about giving a signal to the consumers about who they can trust to be safe in the market."

The office proposed a restructured licensing hierarchy, which makes each specialty its own separate "micro-license." Those smaller blocks can be used to build the traditional, overarching licenses like master esthetics, or cosmetology.

Barriers to entry

The director says there is a "misalignment between training and what's actually in the scope of practice."

"If you're seeking licensure right now," Shumway said, "you may have to spend time and money getting trained on skills that you actually don't need or want." In the current structure, students may be required to pay for and receive training in professional areas they do not want, just for the license, he explains, calling that "a misuse of the state's coercive power, or legal power."

Interviews KSL.com conducted with beauty school students who protested in August showed there was a divide between those wanting licenses to prove they are experts in the trade, versus those pursuing licenses as a required first step in consumer safety.

The state review office is recommending the Legislature take the stance that licensing be "about providing a requirement to make sure everyone is safe to that minimum standard," Shumway said.

"We want to make sure that students or licensees don't have to spend any more time or money than they have to in order to get to that consumer safety level," according to the director, similar to that of the food industry. Being a chef requires a food safety certification, but that has no bearing on the skill level of the professional.

The office believes that the new micro-license structure will save money and allow practitioners to jump into one specialty and add onto their scope over time.

Other considerations

Kirsi Jarvis, a policy analyst with the Office of Professional Licensure Review, said the office is also recommending limiting the number of apprentices one supervisor can have to two across the board and make school hour requirements equal to on-the-job hours so that they can transfer more easily.

Many students at the demonstration in August worried that federal financial aid would be impacted by widespread changes. Jarvis said that the two major traditional licenses, cosmetology and master esthetics, would still be Pell Grant eligible, though the individual micro-licenses would not.

In terms of portability, Jarvis said that the master esthetics license "is beyond the scope of many other esthetics licenses in other states," so should be transferable, while two additional micro-licenses would be required to transfer a cosmetology license out of state.

None of the recommendations would take place until 2026, Jarvis says. Starting with the 2027 license renewal cycle, current license holders can attest to the micro-licenses they have already been trained on.

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