Part Three of: What is the best spray tan machine and equipment?

Experience matters: Make sure that the company specializes in highly recommended spray tan machines. If they don’t, then the machine was probably not engineered by someone with any experience in the spray tan business. (Simply: would you trust a plumber to give your clients a facial peel? Of course not, so why trust a copycat company to create a well-designed spray tan machine?)

How loud is too loud for your spray tan machine?

Ask yourself this: Do you want your client to get a tan, or do you want them to go deaf?

Your client is not only coming to you for a beautiful, natural tan, they are coming to you for a relaxing experience.

What should your machine sound like?

Traditionally, I tend to suggest that your machine should not be much louder than your vacuum cleaner. Because you will want to talk to your client, to let them know what you’re doing or just to be friendly, you will want to be able to talk over the noise your machine generates without having to yell.

Spray Guns: avoid plastic needles like the plague

While a spray gun with a plastic needle will be cheaper, it is cheaper for a reason. Over time the plastic needle is actually eroded by the air being pushed through the gun, eventually causing spotting and blotching while you spray. Being plastic, a single groove created during cleaning can ruin the way the solution is sprayed from the gun. The tip of the needle can be blunted and cause the same spotting, blotching problem as before. In the end, plastic is easily bent, broken, and pitted, so why run the risk when you can simply get a spray gun with a steel needle and avoid all the hassle?

What needles your spray gun should have

You should look for a spray gun that has a steel needle and here’s why:

How long will a steel needle last? Your entire lifetime. Unless you do something drastically wrong you should never need to replace it.

A steel needle ensures that the mist you are spraying is always the same consistency, ensuring your client has a great, even tan every time.

The more research you can do the better, and you’re more than welcome to attend any Aviva training program to learn more. 

Part Two of: What is the best spray tan machine and equipment?

Look for a warranty

A warranty is not just a promise to fix something that breaks; it’s a company’s confidence in their own product.

If the machine you’re looking at doesn’t come with a warranty: run! That machine doesn’t have a warranty for a specific reason—it’s going to break down.

The longer their warranty, the greater their confidence.

To protect yourself, you should really only be looking at companies that offer a year (or longer) warranty. Anything shorter than a year runs the risk of a machine randomly breaking down, but after a year if the machine hasn’t broken it most likely will not (Think of it in terms of your car: it’s either going to break down all the time, or you’re going to break down before it will).

Don’t buy off of a third-party website

Don’t get me wrong: I love Amazon.com as much as the next person. I buy little gifts, books, and stuff from them, but I would never buy a car off the website. For one thing you don’t know who you’re buying from. Yes, they might be an honest, reliable person, but they might also be selling you some cheap, broken knockoff. While it might not be a big problem that the pages of my book are bent, it would be a big deal if your spray tan machine came with a broken fan.

The main problem I’ve had with places like Amazon and Ebay is that, after I’ve purchased the item, I am on my own if anything goes wrong. Have you ever tried to contact a seller on Amazon? I have, and I would rather French-kiss a land mine than go through that particular brand of torture again. On top of being easy to contact, especially with something as important as a spray tan machine for a spray tan business, you want to deal with someone who knows what they’re talking about. What if you have a wedding party coming in for a group spraying and you need answers NOW—would you want to hear, “Well gee…have you tried kicking it?” or would you rather be told, “Yes, we know what the problem is.”

Where you should buy

You should always try to buy direct from a reliable company. Look up reviews about the company, talk to other spray tan salons and hear what they have to say about their machine:

--Does their machine come with a warranty?

--How was the customer service of the company they bought the machine from?

--How hard is it to get in contact with the company if something goes wrong with the machine?

--What other equipment does the company sell? (Are you going to have to buy the rest of your spray tanning supplies elsewhere/does the company specialize in air compressors or spray tan machines?)

Part One of: What is the best spray tan machine and equipment?

Choosing the best spray tan machine is one of the hardest decisions out there. Your client deserves the best for their money, and so do you. There are so many knockoff brands that sometimes it makes me want to pull out my hair, so I decided to create a list to keep myself from going bald. The question I asked myself was: If I were to open a spray tan salon, could I afford to invest in a machine that was going to break down or not produce the greatest results?

Luckily, I found that there are some pretty easy guidelines to follow on what to look for, and what to avoid.

What you should look for in a spray tan machine

You wouldn’t try to do calligraphy with a crayon; similarly, not all spray machines are designed for tanning. Some are for detailing cars, others for painting houses; you don’t want either of these for your business. What you should be looking for is a machine that offers the smallest margin of error while also giving your client the most even, healthy, natural-looking tan possible.

Any machine that offers you power beyond what you need is simply a waste of money. A good rule of thumb is that if you are paying anything over 1,000 dollars, then you are a overpaying so please don’t go looking for those ridiculously strong machines—they won’t tan your clients faster, but they will tan your walls, your ceiling, and your dog. The thing is you don’t need more power than is necessary: this is for your spray tanning company, not for peeling barnacles off your fishing boat.

You also don’t want a heavy machine. Ask yourself: at the end of the day, how tired are you? Are you going to want to lug some monster of a spray machine into your car or closet? The general rule that I use is to look for anything under 30 pounds: I tend to use my vacuum cleaner as a guideline.

In a perfect world you would never need to worry about dropping your machine, but in the real world things happen: when that day comes you want to make sure that your equipment can take it. Don’t take some foreign knockoff made with thin, cheap plastic, look for a machine that is protected by a thick shell.

Don’t look for the “bargain bin” equipment, but also don’t go all out

I love a good bargain, I fight old ladies at tag sales for the “early bird special”, but even I know that just because something is cheap doesn’t mean that it’s also a good deal—looking at you creepy clown statue—but I also know that not everything that’s expensive is a good deal either. I try to find the middle ground with my purchases, and when looking for a spray tan machine you should too. 

Bells and whistles are fine if you are shopping for bells and whistles, but really you don’t need anything too fancy on your machine. If your spray gun has a laser pointer, a deluxe carrying case, and comes with five sets of colored clip-on covers: yup, you overpaid. If your spray tan machine came from “Bob’s Discount Tanning Supplies”, has a warning on it that it could explode at any moment, and has two settings: stun and kill; you probably should have gone with a higher-end product.

If you would like a demonstration, feel free to come in to Aviva and check out the spray tan machines we have available.