Economics of Haircuts

Graham Cree

Abstract:

After a brief historical introduction on the subject, I parameterize the combined expense of
getting your hair cut and the cost of hair products (shampoo, conditioner, etc.). Seeking the
minimize any person’s personal expenditure on hair care, the key variable I seek to solve is ,
the number of haircuts per unit time. A parameterization is given in terms of several
individually estimable personal factors, so that any user of my formulation can easily optimize
their routine.
Historical Introduction

I got my hair cut the other day. While this was happening I thought “I can’t believe I’m paying
money for this hack-job”, but I shrugged it off. The following day in the shower I noticed how
much less shampoo (and conditioner) I was able to use as a result of having shorter hair. This
led to the realization: perhaps what I am paying for is not the haircut itself; it’s an investment in
shampoo I won’t have to buy. And so that morning I sought a solution to the problem, seeking
what savings I did or did not acquire.

Derivation

For a task that must exist in a cycle, such as cutting your hair, it does not make practical sense
to speak of a flat dollar amount. It makes far more sense to speak of expenditure per unit time,
that is dollars/month for example, but I leave dimensional choice up to the end-user, and speak
in general terms.

So if we define the expenditure per unit time to be

(1)

where is the cost of haircuts per unit time, and is the cost of shampoo (by which I mean
any directly length dependant consumable, so conditioner applies as well) per unit time.

The first one is easy. We can easily calculate to be

(2)

Where is the cost per haircut, and is the frequency of haircuts (haircuts/unit time).

The second term gets trickier. For simplicity I break it down into steps.

(3)

where is the cost per bottle of shampoo, is the volume per bottle of shampoo, and is
the volume consumed per unit time. This third factor is where the action happens. We can
break that down as well.

(4)

Where is the numbers of showers (in which shampoo is used) per unit time, is the volume
consumed per unit hair length (a typical choice of units might be mL per inch of hair), and
is the length of hair at a given time .
My key assumption is that we are dealing with linear rates of hair growth. In such a case we can
model as shown below

L (t)

Figure 1 Model of L(t) assuming linear growth rates. The natural frequency of fH, the frequency of haircuts

We represent the growth rate (hair length per unit time) as . Using the fundamental theorem
of calculus we can write

(5)

or to encompass an entire period (using a transparent re-labelling of )

(6)

(7)

If we consider the minimum to be “the length to which you get your hair cut”, labelled as ,
then it is clear what you average hair length is:

(8)

(9)

If we fold equation 9 back into equation 4, and then equation 4 back into 3, and then both
equations 3 and 2 back into equation 1, we get the following

(10)
This is the amount of money per unit time any given person spends on haircuts. To minimize
your expenses, we date the derivative with respect to the frequency of haircuts

(11)

If we set this derivative to 0, we are living at the minima of expense. At this point we can solve
to get

(12)

We cannot underestimate the square root dependence of the ideal frequency of haircuts on
any of these parameters. This result should help quell overreaction to inflating shampoo or
haircut prices. Note that a percentage increase in the cost of either will cancel each other out,
as it should. Furthermore, this result is not dependant on how you like your hair cut: the
preferred length, , does not factor into the most economical cut frequency. Most of the
remaining parameters are easily estimable. The more difficult of course are and . In order
to optimize your own routine, I recommend taking data over at least one hair cut cycle to
minimize your uncertainties on these two values.