CNN, London —
This is a familiar situation for many women: A woman goes to a salon to get her hair cut and spends a lot of money, while her male partner, brother, uncle or friend spends significantly less at the barbershop or the same salon.
But are women really paying more for the same services? Can the price difference be justified? Or is this another example of the “pink tax”, where products and services aimed at women are unreasonably more expensive than those aimed at men?
The available data certainly supports the complaints of many women.
Last year, the average price for a standard haircut across the US was $51.71 for a woman, compared with $34.56 for a man, according to transaction data provided exclusively to CNN by payments provider Square. The cheapest state for a haircut for women was South Dakota, where it cost $31.43, nearly 1.5 times the price of the cheapest haircut for men in the state, $21.59.
Across the Atlantic, the data is very, uh, clear.
A 2020 YouGov survey of British consumers found that women pay an average of £31.99 ($40.80) for a basic haircut that includes a wash and blow-dry — more than double the average £12.17 ($15.50) that men pay for the same service.
YouGov calculated that women pay an average of £135 ($172) a year for a haircut, compared with an average of £70 ($89) for men. “Women tend to get their hair cut less frequently, but that’s still not enough to make up for the difference in the price they pay,” Matthew Smith, YouGov’s head of data journalism, wrote at the time.
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A man gets his hair cut at a barber’s in Colchester, England.
And yet, like a two-tone keratin-trimmed balayage, it’s complicated.
Many hair salons and barbershops offer a potentially limitless number of haircuts, colorings and treatments, and these businesses employ staff with different levels of skill and training to cater to customers with a wide range of hair types and lengths.
There’s also wide variation in the type of experience customers are looking for, said Fred Jones, general counsel for the California Professional Beauty Alliance, a trade group that has expanded since the pandemic to represent hair-care companies and workers across the state.
“At high-end places you can get champagne or sparkling wine for half a day, but at cheaper places you might get a quick haircut and be gone in 15 minutes,” he told CNN.
This diversity makes it “very difficult to tell” whether women are paying higher prices simply because of their gender, Jones said.
“Nobody wants to be discriminated against in our industry…If the word gets out that your salon is discriminating for any reason, it will negatively impact your bottom line,” he added.
Tara Farmer, editor of Fash, a site that connects consumers with local businesses across the U.S., said the main reason women are priced higher than men is because of the difference in typical hair length.
“Women’s haircuts generally take longer than men’s, and often involve longer hair and the use of additional styling products, tools and techniques,” Farmer wrote in a January report on the issue.
The report found that the average cost of a haircut for women nationwide ranged from $45 to $75, while for men it ranged from $25 to $50, but did not specify whether a typical women’s haircut included additional services such as a blow-dry.
Add-on services like coloring can easily push the price into triple digits: The average cost of balayage highlights, a natural coloring style that focuses dye toward the ends of the hair, was $175 in 2022, according to data from Fash.
Rachel Brightman/Newsday RM/Getty Images
Women sit at a sink at Tapestry Salon & Spa in West Babylon, New York, in June 2020.
Caroline Larissey, chief executive of the UK trade group National Hair & Beauty Federation (NHBF), told CNN that women are more likely than men to ask for these extra services: “Women will typically ask for a cut and blow-dry in addition to shampoo, condition and treatment, whereas men who go to the barber are more likely to ask for a dry cut,” she said.
Still, women are generally charged about 2.5 times what men are charged for an equivalent haircut, Larisay said, but she added that a “handful” of people in the industry have started to charge based on how long people spend in the chair, rather than on gender — something the NHBF actively encourages.
“We have to adapt as an industry,” Larissay said.
“Old-fashioned and outdated”
New York City-based hairstylist Christine Rankin believes gender-based pricing should be abolished altogether. “When you go to beauty school to be a hairstylist, you learn how to cut hair,” Rankin told CNN. “This fallacy of learning how to cut men’s hair and not women’s hair is ridiculous.”
In 2016, Rankin founded the Dress Code Project, a nonprofit that trains hair stylists and hair salon owners to create environments that affirm the gender identities of people who don’t often fit into the binary categories of “male” or “female.”
They say there are two ways to do this: by charging according to the length of hair, or by the time it takes to cut. “It creates an atmosphere where it’s easy to misgender people,” which can have a “huge psychological impact,” Rankin added.
Goldie x Bob is one of several hair salons that did away with gender-based pricing five years ago: Now, “customers pay for time and expertise, and it has nothing to do with gender,” says Liz Barnes, founder of the Denver-based salon.
Short haircuts are automatically scheduled for an hour, but “if it only takes 30 minutes,[the customer]only pays for 30 minutes. There’s no flat rate,” salon manager Ashley Heath told CNN.
Before the switch, Goldie x Bob was charging men with short hair an average of $60 for a basic shampoo and haircut, while women were typically charged $85 for similar services.
Burns told CNN that the difference can be explained by the fact that female clients generally have longer hair that requires more blow-drying and takes longer to style, while clients with hair that sits closer to the head (mostly men) require less styling and are usually happy to let it air-dry, she said.
But “it felt archaic and outdated to continue going in that direction,” Burns said, adding that the move to gender-neutral pricing was an attempt to “promote inclusivity and equity.” Burns said she has noticed an increase in the number of male and non-binary clients visiting her salon since the pricing change.
Dress Code Project’s Rankin would likely agree: “Hair has absolutely no gender,” they say. “It’s literally just dead tissue on the top of your head.”
