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Donald J. Trump appears to be more concerned about the quality of his hair than the quality of the air.

Mr. Trump has offered little in the way of an environmental policy during his presidential campaign, but on Wednesday he said that President Obama’s concerns about the environment were infringing on his rights as a consumer. More pressing than saving the ozone layer, he suggested, was the freedom to buy aerosol hairspray.

“You can’t use hairspray because hairspray is going to affect the ozone,” Mr. Trump said during a rally in South Carolina. “They don’t want me to use hairspray, they want me to use the pump.”

Mr. Trump’s singular hairstyle has been the subject of widespread speculation over the years, and on Wednesday he made it clear that he gave considerable thought to maintaining his signature look.

Imitating the “bing, bing, bing” sound that his current hair product makes when he applies it with a pump, Mr. Trump revealed that he had a strong preference for old-fashioned aerosol sprays.

“It comes out in big globs, right, and it’s stuck in your hair and you say, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to take a shower again, my hair is all screwed up,’” Mr. Trump lamented to a laughing audience.

Aerosol sprays were actually phased out in the United States in the 1990s, years before Mr. Obama was president, and the ban resulted from the Montreal Protocol in 1987, signed by President George H. W. Bush, which sought to curtail the damage aerosol products did to the disappearing ozone layer. Since then, the hairspray industry has been able to find substitutes that produce the same misty effect of CFCs and aerosol.

The Obama administration has made reducing carbon emissions a crucial part of its agenda to combat global warming. But Mr. Trump said that the president was a hypocrite on the issue because he flies around the world in the antiquated Air Force One, releasing harmful toxins.

For his part, Mr. Trump said that he did his spraying inside his well-sealed Manhattan penthouse, inflicting little damage on the atmosphere.

“I don’t think anything gets out,” Mr. Trump said of the pollutants he emits while taming his hair.

Coral Davenport contributed reporting.