‘Fairy hair’ brings her clients joy. Officials said she might be breaking a law.
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- State regulators probed fairy hair services to assess licensing requirements.
- Board argued fairy hair may require cosmetology certification and a licensed shop.
- Artist says certification costs and hours could disrupt freelance fairy hair work.
State officials warned Leslie Stern with a letter. Then they sent inspectors to shops and events she was working at in Wilmington, Durham and Winston-Salem.
It wasn’t illicit contraband they were after. It was information about glittery threads of tinsel that they wanted.
It’s called fairy hair and is meant to be a quick and temporary addition to someone’s look. And it’s intended to bring joy, which, Stern said, it does for many of her regular clients.
But, to the North Carolina Board of Cosmetic Art Examiners, the accessory may still require a natural haircare certification — and a licensed shop to practice in. That could mean hundreds of hours of training and thousands of dollars for Stern and other artists like her.
“That would be extremely disruptive for my life,” Stern, whose only hair-related craft is installing the accessory, told The News & Observer. “Fairy hair is not even something that’s being taught in these programs, so it’s not relevant to what I do.”
The hurdle is also one of North Carolina’s “most restrictive” forms of labor regulation, according to a 2021 publication from The John Locke Foundation.
On the state side, regulators don’t seem to have enough information yet to say whether Stern’s service would require a license or not, executive director Lynda Elliot told The N&O.
At first, fairy hair seemed to fall within applicable state licensing laws, but Elliot said there are questions over how the accessory is installed. The board is pumping the brakes on enforcement as a result.
“As I was receiving more information regarding this service, we have stopped aggressively going out or taking any action until we figure out where it falls,” Elliot said.
Stern’s fairy hair business was the subject of visits by state officials to two shops in North Carolina.
Anonymous complaint leads to inspections
Cecilia H. de Davis said she’d just walked into her Durham art space in mid-March when she overheard her assistant talking to a woman at the front desk.
“She was asking about, if we were selling extensions in the gallery,” de Davis said, adding that her shop didn’t sell hair extensions.
De Davis said the inspector took photos of the space and asked her to open a cabinet that was locked — and belonged to an artist who rents space in the studio. De Davis couldn’t — she didn’t have the key.
“I would need more information, because that’s not common practice,” Elliot, the board’s director, said when asked about the incident. “We don’t go into a business we don’t license or regulate and have them start unlocking and opening doors and stuff like that.”
Sandra Peruzzi, who has worked at Blue Moon Gift Shops in Wilmington for 26 years, also said an inspector showed up asking about fairy hair. She told the inspector that, yes, the shop has had someone coming in to do that service for years.
“She didn’t use the word illegal,” Peruzzi said. “But she said that there was a complaint filed against us and against Leslie because of the fact that she was doing fairy hair in our establishment.”
The board has received an “explosion of complaints” over the last two months, according to Elliot.
Stern said she didn’t know why someone would file a complaint against her, other than over her extensive — and loyal — clientele.
She said she “could imagine that would ruffle some feathers” of licensed hairdressers trying to get into the fairy hair business.
How fairy hair is applied
A simple slipknot, added with what is basically a crocheting hook, fixes the metallic thread to a single strand of hair, according to Stern. She said she doesn’t use glue, clamps or anything else that could put tension on the hair strand.
Kelley Jefferson, who racked up over 40 years of experience doing hair and makeup before retiring from the film industry, told The N&O that a tangle puts more tension on someone’s hair than Stern’s fairy hair application.
“I don’t see why she has to have any knowledge of natural hair just to put in a slipknot of tinsel in the hair,” Jefferson said. “Don’t get it.”
It could take state regulators a month to figure out where fairy hair falls along state regulations, according to Elliot.
Meanwhile, Stern has plenty of fairy hair requests to keep her busy.
This story was originally published March 20, 2026 at 12:09 PM.
CORRECTION: Photo captions in an earlier version of this story misspelled Liz Buno’s name.
