Faced with the adoption of trendy foreign hairstyles by a growing number of students, Chinese schools are coming up with desperate measures to enforce their strict haircut policies.

The latest of these measures involves posting barbers at the school gates to trim long or dyed hair on the spot.

Chinese students returning from their summer break with new haircuts to show off to their colleagues were greeted with a really nasty surprise right at the school entrance – a barber ready to trim any hairdos that didn’t comply with regulations. Photos posted by students of the Qinhan Secondary School, in Xi’an, China’s Shaanxi province, show kids walking by piles of freshly cut hair and a scissors-wielding barber working his magic on an offender.

“A small number of students were found to be affected by the negative social influence of dyed and permed hair, which affects their comprehensive development,” a school official said in a statement. “In order to create a positive and healthy learning environment for students, the school has ruled that boys should have crew cuts and girls should grow hair down to the ear, to ensure they can focus on their studies.”

Perms and dyed hair have apparently become especially popular among Chinese teenagers, so in order to be allowed access to class without first having to have their hair trimmed, “anyone who was born with either curly or blonde hair should go to the hospitals to prove they did not dye or perm it,” school rules state.

At Xiamen Industrial and Commercial Tourism College, in Fujian province, girls are banned from fashioning a fringe hairstyle and boys cannot have hair longer than six millimeters in length.

Furious students have been blasting the strict provisions enforced by Chinese schools on social media websites like Sina Weibo, with many going as far as refusing to go to school or college rather than cut their hair.