The emotional commodification could create a convivial and comfortable atmosphere for customers (Sheane, 2011). For example, it is the responsibility of a nurse to conceal disgust and show patience; it is the duty of teachers to correctly guide their students by showing caring and concealing exasperation.
There are three fundamental characteristics of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983). (1) The face-to-face or voice contact with customers. (2) It might exist some contrast between the employees' real experience feelings with the expression of specific attitudes and emotions during the work. (3) It is reasonable for employers to manage and supervise employees' emotional activities, through display rules such as training programmes and social stereotypes of work behaviours. Some researchers, like Sturdy, (1998) have found that the prevalence of emotional labour coincides with the trend of service industry growth. To some extent, this shows that emotional labour is the main trend in the service sector currently. Consequently, it is inevitable for the service sector to entail a proliferation of emotional labour (Harris, 2002).
Within hairdressing transforming from practical to enjoyable types, it is reasonable for customers to expect more services from their appointments than just a simple haircut (Mintel, 1999). As the typical interactive service, hairdressers' work requirements could match emotional labour's characteristics. First of all, hairdressing needs a relatively long service time which would cause many directly face-to-face contacts between hairdressers and clients. Therefore, they need to fully utilise their speaking skills and body languages to pleasure their customers. It has a high emotional content-- part of the hairdresser's task is to make customers 'likes' him or her, and has positive feelings or even loyalty for the beauty salon or their service products (Sheane, 2011).