Once a trip to the hairdresser’s involved nothing more challenging than a chat about your latest holiday.
Now it seems a quick cut and blow dry could come with a conversation about your carbon footprint.
Experts are calling for state-sponsored eco-stylists to nudge clients towards sustainable lifestyles.
It comes after a pilot scheme found that what we chat about in the salon changes our everyday lives.
A report revealed chatty stylists are the perfect influencers to subtly bring about behaviour change. Hairdressers have previously been trained to spot signs of domestic abuse.
In the pilot scheme – called Mirror Talkers – stickers carrying green tips were stuck to salon mirrors to spark conversations, and 73 per cent of people subsequently pledged to make planet-friendly changes to their haircare habits.
Now ministers are being urged to back schemes that could see subliminal lectures in unlikely places – including cafes, restaurants and farmers’ markets.
The latest study – led by Oxford University and the Government-funded Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations – wants to tackle ‘pluralistic ignorance relating to climate action’.
It claims hairdressers have ‘considerable untapped potential regarding the influence [they] could have on clients’.
‘While researchers can equip people with the tools and knowledge to become better at public engagement, in fact, hairdressers are already experts,’ it says.
The authors, convened by Oxford’s Dr Sam Hampton, envisage salon chats ‘beginning with haircare as a point of connection, but expanding to broader conversations about energy, transport, food, investments, carbon literacy and intergenerational responsibility’.
Calling for funding, they concluded: ‘Yielding the power of everyday influencers to build public consensus is an under-utilised strategy which demands new approaches to climate policy.’
The latest study also involved the Universities of Southampton and Utrecht in the Netherlands.
