A number of salon pros recently joined a heated battle on a “TanTalk” Message Board (www.tantalk.com) over the subject of providing tanners with free eyewear vs. selling goggles. Following are some excerpts from the thread; it got into a lot of name-calling and repetition, so I have edited and changed some online names.
Tiger: “Bye, bye goggles! After 3 years, I’ve finally decided that I will no longer furnish goggles. I will have goggles and disposables available for purchase and they can buy disposables if they forget their goggles. I’m sick and tired of goggles walking out of here! It’s also so much safer using your own goggles, even though we thoroughly sanitize ours.”
Jazzy: “We switched two months ago! I put out some educational materials on eye infections from sharing goggles. I compare it to sharing toothbrushes. We put up the notice a month before and even sold used goggles to my tanners.”
Sizzles: “If they are going to complain about goggles for $2.50, then perhaps you don’t need them as clients! I would never want to use someone else’s eyewear even if it was ‘sanitized’. GROSS!”
Bright Beach: “Would you lie in a tanning bed after it has been sanitized? GROSS!”
I-M: “We stopped lending 2 years ago and now when they have no eyewear, I ask them, “Which ones would you like, this or this one—they are $1 for one time use (Canadian salon). Eyewear is a good moneymaker.”
Sizzles: “Leave it to Bright Beach to make a comparison where no one else would! Laying on a piece of acrylic is a lot different than putting goggles on your eyes that just came form a jar of 90% sanitizer solution and 10% gunk that came off the goggles after the last person! I have yet to see a sanitizer jar that wipes the goggles after each use. Have you seen a phone after someone else uses it? It’s all wax and dead skin. Same thing with goggles for me!”
Bright Beach: “Do you bring your dinnerware to restaurants? Your comb to the beauty salon?”
Sizzles: “You must be one of those 4% of salons that offer sanitized goggles for your clients to use. I would never burden myself with FREE goggle management.”
Bright Beach: “We are in the service business. It’s our business to manage the goggles and bed cleaning.”
Tiger: “Did anyone see the photos in the Island Sun Times? The photos of genital warts on the eye was enough to sway me!”
Bright Beach: “4%? Where’s the documentation for that one?”
[Author’s note: My professional opinion is that about half the salons in the U.S. provide goggles and almost all of salons in Canada provide eyewear].
Tiger: “I’m selling goggles to pay for my ’05 Cadillac CTS!!”
River Rat: “We provide free goggles and don’t have any problem with them being stolen. We do have them for sale and recommend our clients buy them and they usually do. You think clients using their own goggles are safer? It depends on how they take care of them. If they don’t keep them in the case or a zip-lock bag, they wear them for God-knows-how-long and they collect bacteria from their hands, their purse, gym bag, etc. It is the same as a toothbrush, if you keep re-using your toothbrush and don’t clean it or replace it, you pick up infections and colds.”
Coco: “I used to do nails and we saw a lot of stuff floating in Barbacide at the hair salon. I sell goggles and don’t provide, but you can provide and guarantee you are sanitizing things correctly.”
Sunsation: “I provide goggles. I sell goggles to those that prefer to own. I don’t want to “nickel and dime” my customers!”
EZ Living: “Many clients have said they never used the ‘community’ eyewear given to them at other salons because of their sanitation concerns.”
Grandstand: “Any argument using eye infections for the reason to switch to own-your-own without any serious proof is invalid. All a person with pinkeye needs to do is touch their eye and then the tanning bed handle and the next person who tans touches the handle and then adjusts their personal eyewear and they stand a significant risk of getting an eye infection.”
I-M: “In the end, it is your choice—do you want to make money or are you a charity organization?”
Bright Beach: “This thread should be called ‘Buy, Buy Goggles’, not ‘Bye, Bye Goggles!’”
White Body: “We have to provide goggles in Ohio. If we sell them, we have to sanitize them for 2 minutes before the customer can get in the tanning bed.”
[Author’s Note: Ohio has an ophthalmologist on their Tanning Board. She felt tanners must keep their goggles clean and added into Ohio law that the salon must sanitize personally owned goggles for two minutes before a tanner can use the tanning unit. All states require 10-minute disinfection if goggles are provided by the salon. Texas is the only other state that requires eyewear to be provided at no charge].
Jazzy: “Sometimes you have to get peoples’ attention about eyewear and using scare tactics to frighten people into paying attention to protecting their eyes actually works. As a retired medical person, I am very frightened by the crap I see on goggles after someone has used them – the sanitizer doesn’t get under the junk, and we manually have to scrub the goggles and then put them into the disinfectant. After all the staph infections and MREs (resistant bacteria) that are now COMMON in America, I can’t justify allowing anybody to use community goggles anymore. The risk for our customer no longer justifies the level of sharing and it takes just one little infection. I’ve seen super-infections in my practice, and have worked with several cases of flesh-eating bacteria in the last few years to know that you don’t want to share anything if you can avoid it. Can you imagine getting herpes in your eye? Can you imagine your salon getting sued because a customer loses an eye? Can you imagine the rate we’ll be paying for our business insurance when those pencil-necks figure out that the risks for lawsuits are decreased when you don’t share goggles?”
Sweet Tan: “This topic has caused me to change my tag line—‘Support bacteria, it’s the only culture some people get!’
Grandstand: “Ya gotta love it! The great thing about free enterprise is that you are the entrepreneur and you get to make the decisions on how you run your business!”
Tanning industry veteran
Brenda Fishbaugh is president of Eye Pro, Inc,. makers
of disposable eyewear. She travels extensively training salons on the effects
of UV light on vision.
