License and registration, please

If you thought this was going to be a post about traffic cops, you'd be wrong. But I can forgive you for that, because my title was a tad misleading. In fact, this post is about something so different that you will no doubt be totally mystified and dying of curiosity to learn how the title even relates. The topic is: hair care. See? What did I tell you?



My sister was considering the addition of a nice punk streak to her head, something in perhaps a blue or purple that could show off her coolness to everyone.

Just something, you know, subtle.


Since I'm the one that always does her highlights I offered to do her streak as well, and when we noticed a small beauty supply store while we were out grocery shopping we decided to stop in. I explained what we were looking for to the cashier and asked if she had anything like what we needed, and to my surprise she eyed me up and down and said, "Well, are you licensed?" I replied in the negative, and in a condescending tone she told me, "Then all the items I could sell you are on that shelf," and she pointed to a rather sad and dusty shelf in a forgotten corner with five or so dejected looking boxes (clearly they knew they were not destined for a salon life).

Contents: unknown...



Dutifully, we went and looked at the shelf but quickly discovered that it had nothing we could use, and so we left. On the way out I stopped and said, "One more thing. Both my sister and I have tried at times to dye our hair dark brown, but as you can see from hers it quickly fades to a sort of red. I've been told that to keep it from fading we would need something called a filler. Do you have that, and is that something I could apply from home?" I don't know what I thought she'd say, since she had been none-to-helpful to a civilian like myself before, but I was very surprised at her response: "Well, since you're not licensed I really couldn't tell you about that, or how to do it. I could be held liable if something were to go wrong, you see."




What??? What was she expecting would go wrong? Was this merely hair-related - perhaps she feared I'd cause my sister to go bald and then come looking to sue her. Or was she afraid of something more dire, like maybe I'd be using this sinister filler to create home-made bombs which I would then use to blow up the beauty supply stores all over Idaho? I guess you never can tell with us fishy non-licensed folk. We're likely to do just about anything!

Unlicensed stylist at work.



The end of the story is that we left dye-less, and as of yet we haven't added that streak of brightly colored rebellion to my sister's hair. Next time I go in a store like that and someone asks if I have a license, I think my response will be, "I could tell you, but then I'd have to KILL YOU."