Kansas Thinks You Need 1,000 Hours of Training To Remove Hair

Bryn Green of Hays, Kansas, has a 16-month-old son and a dream of starting a business that’ll give her the flexibility to care for him.

For the past few years, Green has received sugaring services—a noninvasive, nonhazardous hair removal procedure that involves applying a sugar, water, and lemon juice paste to a client’s skin. A sugaring business, she thought, could be “something that I could do part time” or on “a super flexible schedule that would allow me to stay home with my son and also provide some additional income for our family,” Green tells Reason.

But Green quickly learned that it’s illegal to remove a single hair from a client as a sugarer without a state-issued occupational license.

Green is now suing the Kansas Board of Cosmetology for the right to sugar without a license, represented by the Kansas Justice Institute, a public-interest litigation center. “The state of Kansas has unreasonable occupational licensing requirements,” says Samuel G. MacRoberts, general counsel and litigation director for the Kansas Justice Institute. “They are burdensome, oppressive, they’re protectionist, and the Kansas Constitution prevents the government from imposing that type of licensing regime for sugaring and for Bryn Green.”

Green could either obtain an esthetician or cosmetology license to legally offer sugaring services. Getting an esthetician license, while less time-intensive at 1,000 required education hours, would mean driving two and a half hours each way to the closest approved school in Wichita. Getting a cosmetology license would be possible through a school in Hays, but Green would need to pay $18,200 in tuition. Worse, the cosmetology license requires 1,500 education hours.

The vast majority of that curriculum is completely unrelated to sugaring. “If you look at the curriculum for specifically a cosmetology license,” only “a small percentage of it is temporary hair rem