It started in early October 2018. I don’t think I was even looking for anything in particular, just browsing eBay when I came across an ad for a spray tanning machine going for £20. I knew next to nothing about spray tanning at the time but thought that ‘her indoors’ might like a tan and that a single spray tan would probably cost about the same as all this equipment so it looked like a bit of a bargain. Expecting it to go for much more I put in a bid for £21. Much to my surprise I did win the auction. Woking is not to far away and I popped down there in my lunch hour. Not only was the machine and tent, paper underwear and hats and stuff exactly as described but the woman who was selling it found some tanning liquid as well that she threw in for nothing. About a litre and a half of LA Tanning liquid. That (as I later found out) is worth thirty five or forty quid so I was (and still am) pretty happy with my purchase.
I had helped spray a Hillman Imp car once but that was many years ago and I (rightly) suspected that spraying people might be a little different. Where else to go but YouTube? There is some good stuff there and I learnt what I could and then when I was looking for some sticky feet, which my kit did not come with, I found yet another absolute bargain on eBay.
As it says, this was an online course. It started off with a bit of history, theory and health and safety. It then went on to how to do it with a short video. There was a simple enough test and then a bit about business. In order to get your certificate you have to send in three ‘case studies’ (before, during and after photos of you doing a spray tan) and a video. You should send them in one at a time so you can learn from any feedback. If you do that ok you get your certificate which allows you to get insurance though Radius Insurance. Celotan sells this course on it’s website for £69. I would not pay that for it since you can get face to face training for that kind of money, but a couple of weeks later I looked on eBay again and it had gone down to around £9.99 which I think is not too bad. To take advantage of this price I believe that you must finish it within a certain amount of time whereas if you buy it from their website you can take as long as you like.
I did pass 🙂
The online course was good but I thought it would be better to be shown properly so I signed up for the Sienna X level one course (which cost a good deal more than £9.99). Sienna X’s practical course lasted about five hours, a bit more actually. The first half was mostly introductions, theory and Sienna X products. The second half was practical. Apart from the fact that the sales assistants at Salon Services in Wimbledon (Mitcham really) where the course was held were very unhelpful to my model, keeping her waiting for ages before finally letting her upstairs, it was a good course. The tutor demonstrated the Sienna X routine (on me) and we all had a couple of practice runs with water before launching in with the real stuff. After we had performed a tan to her satisfaction we had to fill in a form with a dozen or so fairly basic questions and the certificate turned up in my inbox a week later.
OK so now I am getting into it. There are level two and three courses with Sienna X but they won’t let you do level 2 until three months after you finished lvl 1 so I joined The Guild of Beauty Therapists for a number of reasons:-
- It seems to be a fairly cheap way to get insurance.
- If someone goes onto their website and asks where the nearest spray tanner is, it might be me.
- They have some other courses that look relevant some of which are heavily discounted to guild members.
Actually the date is wrong on the certificate. It is my fault, I changed my mind. Originally I was going to have it start on the first of Jan just to make it nice and tidy but decided to bring it forward (to the 6th December) just in case they upped the price of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) course they were running.
In early January I went on another spray tanning course, this one with Beaubronz. The training was held in a lovely little spa called Hula Beauty in Hackney and was made out of a shipping container.
I did levels one and two at the same time (which I think she only allowed because I had already done the Sienna X training) but it was all new stuff using an airbrush rather than my usual HVLP machine and learning the rudiments of contouring.
I am still spraying people and getting some practise in and although I enjoy training I had spent a bit too much on it recently so I was pretty pleased to find some training that was free.
There is no escaping the fact that face to face training is vastly superior to online stuff but there are a couple of American online courses that I was (am) interested in but by English standards they are ridiculously expensive. No sensible person would pay hundreds of pounds for an online course when they could be taught properly with some brands for fifty quid, although most are between eighty and a hundred and twenty. One of the online courses I was looking at was Katie Quinn’s complete contouring academy. The so called ‘normal price’ of round about five hundred US dollars (around three hundred and seventy five quid at the time of writing) is ridiculous. The ‘sale price’ of a hundred and fifty quid is still colossally overpriced. When I got an email with one of these ‘for twenty four hours only’ deals where it had gone down to seventy five quid, I took the view that it was not going to go any lower and signed up.
I read an article in the paper about a beautician who had saved several lives by spotting dodgy looking ‘moles’ on her clients and advising them to go and get them checked out. It turns out that she knew what to look for because she had done the MASCED (Melanoma and Skin Cancer Early Detection) online course. Since spray tanners get to see bits of their clients that, unless they have rubber necks, they never even see themselves I thought it would make sense to do the course myself
I have still been tanning but it has been a while since I did any more training so when I saw an online course with wowcher for six quid I could not resist.
It was a very short course that could be completed in ten minutes, certainly not deserving of the face value of £29.99 and I did not learn much that I did not know before, other than a sentence on slimming pills and canthaxanthin (which is not much to do with spray tanning anyway) but I have done loads of these short cheap or free courses now. For someone who hasn’t, it might be worth the six quid I paid.
I am very pleased to say that I have just passed the Sienna X level 2 course. This means that I will be on the therapist finder bit of their website. Rest assured though, even if supermodels and international heads of state start beating a path to my door I will still make time to give you a spray tan.
There is one more Sienna X qualification but I can’t do that for another six months so I had a look at some of the other major players, one of which is undoubtedly Fake Bake.
I think it was a pretty good course. The routine was somewhat different from the Sienna X one, most notably because they advocate starting by spraying the front of the client. They were not dogmatic about it though and I think it better to start with the client’s back as they won’t feel quite so vulnerable that way.
I am not truly ambidextrous (I can only write with my left hand but do most other things right handed) but with spray tanning it does not seem to matter which hand I use. That is fine but it was pointed out that when swapping the gun from one hand to the other sometimes I had a tendency to pull the trigger before the gun was perfectly upright which might have developed into a bad habit had it not been pointed out (I had no idea I was doing it).
Having not done any training for a while I noticed that LAEX training was on sale and since I was going to be in the area anyway I thought I would give them a ring. Stacey Smith (the Chief Cheese of LAEX) could not have been more helpful. She found a model for me and gave me one on one tuition and all this still for the sale price. Highly recommended.
My membership of the Guild of Beauty Therapists is coming up for renewal. The Guild is one of three possible professional membership organisations, the other two being the Federation of Holistic Therapists (FHT) and British Association of Beauty Therapy & Cosmetology (BABTAC). My insurance (which I got through The Guild) is through a company called Hiscox but I was leaning towards an insurance company called ABT even before I realised that I could get ten percent off because of the LAEX course I had done. I still have not made a final decision but I did email The Guild and was told that one of the benefits of membership was that I could do their online Professional Standards for Therapists course free… so I did.
