Patel filed a lawsuit to change laws that hurt industry.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: The burgeoning eyebrow threading industry in Texas got a boost earlier this summer when the state’s highest court ruled that eyebrow threaders don’t need 750 hours of superfluous cosmetology training in order to practice their craft professionally.
The ruling sided with eyebrow threaders who attested most of the 750 training hours did not apply to the health and safety of what they actually do.
While a license to practice threading required 750 hours of training at a state-approved school – at a cost of thousands of dollars – and the successful completion of two licensing exams, “not a minute of the training or a single question on the exams was devoted to eyebrow threading,†disclosed the Institute for Justice, which serves as a national civil liberties law firm.
“That’s the constitutional failing in this case, that the state isn’t bothering to instruct people how to thread, but it’s making threaders nevertheless jump through this regulatory hoop with no intended public benefit,” said Wesley Hottot, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice and the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, during an interview with the Texas Tribune last year.
In Patel vs. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the Texas Supreme Court duly agreed that the licensing requirement violated their constitutional rights to earn a living without unreasonable governmental interference, and was decided after a majority 6-3 vote, according to a release from the Institute for Justice.
The lawsuit found its catalyst in 2008, when the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation suddenly started issuing $2,000 fines and cease-and-desist orders to eyebrow threaders across the state and requiring them to obtain a state cosmetology license, according to the Orange County Register.
“I didn’t want to do business under the threat of anytime the inspector showing up and giving us a ticket,†Patel told The Tribune.
In 2009, Ashish Patel joined five threaders and two threading business owners in a lawsuit claiming that the regulations hurt their ability to do business in Texas. They lost before two lower courts before gaining victory at the highest state level.
“This case concerns far more than whether Ashish Patel can pluck unwanted hair with a strand of thread,†Justice Don Willett wrote in his concurring opinion. “This case is fundamentally about the American Dream and the unalienable human right to pursue painless happiness without curtsying to government on bended knee. It is about whether government can connive with rent-seeking factions to ration liberty unrestrained, and whether judges must submissively uphold even the most risible encroachments,†he continued.
Eyebrow threading is a cosmetic procedure that is used to shape eyebrows and remove other facial hair. According to the Times of India, the technique originated in India and Central Asia either centuries or millennia ago and is marketed today as a more comfortable alternative to waxing or tweezing.