By Michael Wickline at NWAnews.com:

Some people could view as “ridiculous” the state’s requirement for hair braiders to get a cosmetology license in order to serve customers, a state senator acknowledges.

But Sen. Steve Faris, D-Central, said there must be a good, legitimate reason for licensing braiders. He mentioned stopping the transmittal of head lice from one customer to another as a possibility.

Braiding involves the intricate twisting, weaving, extending or locking into dreadlocks of natural hair, and it’s a natural alternative to the damaging chemicals that many blacks use to straighten their hair, said Valerie Bayham, an attorney for the Arlington, Va.-based Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm.

The institute has successfully challenged a hair-braiding licensing law in California, she said.

A separate group, the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, questioned the necessity for licensing braiders in a report that argued that states license too many occupations and undermine competition “under the guise of ‘helping’ consumers. ’”

Both the foundation and institute describe themselves as libertarian.

Last year, a Little Rock woman told the Arkansas Board of Cosmetology she was surprised to learn that she needed a cosmetology license to braid hair at a salon. The board fined her $ 100 for braiding without a license.

Korto Briggs said she had been told she wouldn’t need a license as long as she was not using chemicals and was separated from other hair stylists.

“I really did believe that once I was separated from the other stylists who were working with chemicals that I could braid, being that the only thing that I would need to braid hair naturally is my fingers and a tall comb,” she said.

Briggs, a fashion designer, told the board she’s originally from Africa and braiding is part of African-American culture.

It’s unfair to require her to attend cosmetology school to get a license because she won’t learn anything there about braiding, she said.

“It’s hard to put ‘How to do a corn row’ into [the ] form of words and put it into a textbook,” Briggs told the board, according to its minutes. “And because of this, that’s why I haven’t gone to school and [got ] a license.”

She said some states — Florida, New York, and Tennessee, for example — have developed separate licensing programs for braiders.

“There are many braiders, like myself, [in Arkansas ] that are being robbed of setting up businesses and working unless we go to school to do what other cosmetologists do, even though we’re not going to use any of that information, even though we’re not going to learn anything new about our craft,” Briggs said.

She wouldn’t object if the board set up a program under which braiders learn “the proper methods of sanitation and just looking at the client’s hair and inspecting, washing, all that stuff,” she said...

Bayham of the Institute for Justice said hair braiding is “a great start-up entreprenurial option for those with limited resources. Hair braiding, like so many other occupations, provides outstanding opportunities for economic self-sufficiency so long as governments don’t impose arbitrary barriers to entry.”

But Bayham said a cosmetology license requires thousands of hours of classroom training at a cost of roughly $ 10, 000 to $ 15, 000 in many states and training is often unrelated to African hair braiding.