September 3, 2009

What America Really Needs: Hair Care Reform

A tragic front-page article in the Wall Street Journal recently depicted how economic hard times are driving desperate Americans to take on their own hair grooming.

It’s not a pretty picture: The woman who so mangled her husband’s trim that she ended up shaving his head. The amateur who “made a ‘tic-tac-toe’ board in the back of a friend's head” using a set of shears – a hair-razing scene that morphed into a YouTube sensation. The Fifth Avenue salon that resembles an emergency room, including “clients with hair-dye hazards, wrecked layers and visible signs of emotional distress.”

One thing is clear: America is in the throes of a catastrophic hair care crisis. According to the U.S. Statistical Abstract, Americans in 2006 spent nearly $20 billion a year on professional styling – a 26 percent hike just since the turn of the millennium. Some estimates put the figure at closer to $60 billion.

The situation has changed dramatically from when, as children, we were sent from my grandparents’ home, a dollar in hand, to the corner barber shop at the end of the block, where no one asked how we wanted our hair. It was short and tapered in the back. (Think JFK.)

Today, as with health care, the rise in technology and sophistication – and a brutal iron tangle of salon chains cross-owned by hair care product marketers – are driving costs relentlessly skyward. By 2007, the average haircut ranged between $21 and $45, depending on whom you asked.

More important, a yawning gap has opened in terms of access to quality care. Deprived citizens, forgoing styling services altogether in the face of rising costs and declining income, are shocked to hear of John Edwards’s $400 coiffure and the $800 per that the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna and Naomi Campbell are dropping for a cut at Orlo.

The seriousness of this crisis cannot be underestimated. A research organization recently reported that “salon haircare is regarded as non-discretionary expenditure for women and men because groomed hair – however defined – is a crucial element of a work-appropriate dress code.”

In other words, quality hair care is a necessity – and even, some would say, a right. No one can afford a “bad hair day” at the office at a time when pink slips are raining down from sea to shining sea. 

Not to mention the "psychological disaster" faced in the Journal account by the unfortunate soul who "looked like his head had been through a thrasher." Or the “teary-eyed 18-year-old” who lost eight inches of hair after her “creative attempts” resulted in “huge chunks” missing from her mane.

All of which leaves this reporter stunned at the realization that no member of the Obama Administration nor congressional leader from the Party of Compassion has stepped forward to address this hair care crisis.

But never fear, Dear Readers. As always, I have A Plan.

Today I am proposing the Haircare for Americans Insurance Reform Act, or the HAIR Act for short. Americans will be entitled to free or reduced care at government-owned barber shops and beauty salons. HAIR will initially be financed by taxes on the seemingly innumerable celebrity news magazines and the approximately 1.3 million style-related cable reality television shows.

Of course, even with such rich sources of revenue, unlimited access to professional styling could quickly prove a drain on the Treasury if the program is not managed carefully. Therefore, a standardized set of services will be established, and all expenditures reviewed, by boards of arbiters called Haircare Oversight of Treatment and Therapy Indicia Executives (HOTTIEs) and consisting of the casts of Twilight, Gossip Girl and Shear Genius. (Heck if I really know. Those are the ones my college-age daughter suggested.)

Access to services will be controlled by these “Dearth Panels” on the basis of Tress-Adjusted Styling and Trim Exemplars (TASTE) – with allowances specifically deducted for anyone who wants to dye his or her hair pink or wear a mohawk.

And of course, the most important result of the HAIR Act is that I will finally get the care I could never otherwise justify: My $11,000 hair transplant. After which every day will be a good hair day.

Eat your heart out, Senator Edwards.