Our long lost friend perming seems to be making the headlines again lately, with an 80s fashion revival and more people than ever in our industry reporting rumblings of a perm revival.

As it's been such long time since this service was main stream and enjoyed high popularity it's fair to assume that there might be a skills gap here, or at least a lack of experienced operators.

Whether this revival happens or not, this highly profitable service is well worth mastering from a skills point of view.

Fewer and fewer salons are retaining their skills and keeping pace with perming practice. Just last year the National Vocational Qualification unit of perming was dropped from the mandatory list of requirements and placed on the “options” list, meaning that a young person can now train, study, and achieve NVQ Level 2 and 3 without ever picking up a perm rod at all.

It's worth mentioning here that this action was taken as a result of fairly extensive consultation and feedback from the industry itself.
Even now the opportunities for training in perm winding and processing are very rare.