Beauty salon risk assessment: What you need to know
If you own a beauty salon or run your own beauty business, ensuring health and safety in your business must be your top priority. Business owners are responsible for complying with health and safety regulations and keeping staff, customers and visitors safe.
In this guide, we'll look at what a beauty salon risk assessment is, the law around risk assessments, and your legal responsibilities. In an environment where clients are exposed to chemicals, hot wax and UV light, it is important to have a relevant risk assessment for your beauty salon.
What is a risk assessment in the beauty industry?
A beauty salon risk assessment is a document that you use to identify and eliminate the health and safety hazards in your beauty salon. The risk assessment is not only required by law but also helps you recognise specific risks. These are risks that have the potential to harm your salon, your employees, visitors, and clients. A beauty salon risk assessment will also help you create policies and procedures to protect your clients and employees. You will also need to put a salon fire prevention plan in place.
As a business owner and employer, you're required by law to protect your employees and clients from harm. Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999,
the minimum you must do is:
Identify any hazards that could cause injury or illness in your business
decide how likely it is that someone could be harmed and how seriously
take action to eliminate the hazard, or if this isn't possible, control the risk
Another legislation that you should be aware of is the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH). This requires you to:
Assess your use of hazardous substances and chemicals and assess the risks that they pose.
To make sure that your employees and everyone else in your salon are protected from the risks they pose.
The importance of a beauty salon risk assessment
A risk assessment will support the development of a health and safety policy for your beauty salon. Health and safety commonly refers to the set of regulations and procedures that intend to prevent accidents and injuries in public environments and workplaces. Every business is required to have a health and safety policy and this includes your beauty salon. This will outline the procedure for many different issues and accidents. A health policy is required by the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.
Many different risks can emerge in your beauty salon. It is important, for both clients and employees, that these risks are managed and mitigated as far as possible. This can be any general risks such as slips, trips and falls, or specific risks such as exposure to chemicals. You should complete a risk assessment to make necessary changes to your salon in order to make it a safe environment.
Five steps of a beauty salon risk assessment
In order to perform a risk assessment for your beauty salon, there are five steps that you need to take. Risk assessments are an integral part of keeping your salon safe and up to standard. The five steps are as follows:
Identify the hazards: As a salon owner, you need to walk around the salon and the stockroom and note anything that could be hazardous. You should also consult your staff members about health and safety issues in your salon. It is important to check the products you use for warning labels or potential hazards. Finally, look at your accident book to recognise what issues have previously resulted in incidents. There are also physical risks such as exposure to electricity, slips, trips, and falls. You should also consider chemical hazards. For example, many salons use bleach which is corrosive and flammable.
Decide who is at risk and how: This could potentially be the employees working in your salon, temporary visitors such as contractors, or your clients. You should also consider the types of injuries or health complications that could occur from exposure to each hazard.
Evaluate the risks and take action: In this stage, you need to evaluate the severity and likelihood of each hazard. You should also consider any controls, if any, in place to manage the risks. If your current controls are not good enough, make note of what else needs to be done to prevent incidents from happening. Examples of actions you could take are using newer or safer equipment, avoiding harmful chemicals, and providing health and safety training.
Record your findings: The purpose of recording the findings of your risk assessment is so that you can use and review the assessment moving forward. It's always good practice to pin the risk assessment somewhere clearly visible so that all your employees can see it.
Review regularly: You should review your risk assessment on a regular basis and update it if necessary. There's no specific period for this. However, you should evaluate your risk assessments at least every year.
Possible risks in your beauty salon
There are a great variety of risks that can emerge in your beauty salon, which will be focused on if you are subject to a health and safety inspection after an incident. Below, you can find some possible risks that you can use to inform your beauty salon risk assessment.
Waxing
Hazards: Burns and scalds, the chance of infection
Persons at risk: Client
Control: Ensure that the wax pot is maintained and checked regularly. Test wax on my skin before application on the client. Disinfect equipment after each client.
Eyelash extensions and tint
Hazards: Injury, allergic reaction and chance of infection
Persons at risk: Client
Control: Test patch done 48 hours before treatment. Quiet, peaceful room to ensure no distractions. Good ventilation. Infection control policy.
Salon room
Hazards: Slips, trips and falls
Persons at risk: Clients, staff, external contractors
Control: Keep public areas clear of clutter and ensure equipment is regularly serviced.
Nails
Hazards: Injury and chance of infection
Persons at risk: Clients and staff
Control: Sanitise equipment between clients, ensure equipment is maintained, and make sure staff are adequately trained.
Massage
Hazards: Injury, allergic reaction and chance of infection
Persons at risk: Clients
Control: Take medical history, ensure the massage table is in good working order and clean towels for every client.
Once completed, any discovered hazards should be fixed and changes made to reduce the risk of injury to staff and clients. The risk assessment also needs to be kept current with any changes that occur in the beauty salon. Your beauty salon risk assessment should be reviewed annually to make sure that your safety measures are kept up to date. The overall responsibility of a risk assessment for beauty salons always falls to the business owner/landlord of the building.
How Crysp can help with a risk assessment for your beauty salon
Here at Crysp, we are all about helping beauty salons move away from paperwork and digitise compliance management in order to simplify the process and reduce the stress. In a salon offering a wide variety of beauty services, compliance can be overwhelming. Crysp's one-stop compliance management software can help busy beauty salons document and store paperwork digitally, to ensure they're up-to-date with business legislation and health and safety obligations for clients and staff, and can access it easily whenever it's needed - perfect for individual salons or across multiple sites.
In addition, our expert health and safety advisers can help you create a bespoke risk assessment, tailored to the beauty industry, so you don't have to go it alone.
We hope this information has been useful and will help you when completing a risk assessment for your beauty salon. And remember, Crysp is here to help, so contact us today for a chat about your requirements.