Do you struggle with ways to get your salon guests to wear eye protection for every tanning session? Chicago salon owner Bruce “Sparky” Wood has a unique solution!
When faced with a tanner who says, “I don’t wear eye protection,” Bruce picks up a small flashlight he keeps at the front counter and asks, “See this? It’s a small flashlight. Close your eyes. Can you see the light through your eyelids?” The salon guest will squint – the light from a tiny flashlight held a few inches from the eyes is amazingly bright!
Bruce continues, “Of course you can see the light, you’re squinting! This is a just a little flashlight – you can imagine that the light from the lamps in my mega-beds is much brighter, right?”
An electrician by trade, the “No Tan Lines” owner uses his trusty flashlight in another way to illustrate his point. “I turn on the flashlight and hold it against the palm of my hand, the little trick we did as kids, and ask the tanner what they can see when they look at the back of my hand. They admit being able to see the outline of my finger bones and some veins.” It’s not long before the light bulb goes off (excuse the pun) in his tanners’ heads. “I tell them that of course, their eyelids are thinner than my hand and of course, the lamps in my sunbeds put out a lot more power than the five-watt flashlight bulb! A base sunbed has 400-watt lamps near the face and my high-pressure beds or beds with facial tanners have at least 4,000 watts directly above your face. You don’t want that kind of UV exposure to ruin your vision becaues you tanned without eye protection!”
Sparky also uses a 50-watt light fixture in the ceiling near the counter to demonstrate his point about eye protection. He asks a skeptical salon guest to close their eyes, point their face upward in the direction of the light and wave their hand in front of their eyes. “Can you see the shadow of your hand pass over your face even though your eyes are closed?” Of course, the tanner can. “That 50-watt light is 15 feet from you and filtered by the shade. The sunbed you will use today has at least 1,000 watts of power and the lamps will be six inches frowm your face. Are you sure you don’t want to wear eye protection?”
