One of the skin prep steps you learn to provide as a spray tan artist, is the use of barrier cream! Keeping barrier cream in your sunless kit to prep your clients skin will help to improve the overall experience your client has and the results they get from their fully developed tan. We know there’s quite the long list of items to include in your sunless. You may start to think about whether or not an item, such as barrier cream, is really necessary to use on clients. Today, we are going to talk about what barrier cream actually is and the benefit of using this product on all your clients. The goal for each client is to help them feel as though they're getting a five star service that creates a five star result. Barrier cream is one of the key components to achieving this goal for your clients at every single appointment! So, if you’re on the fence about whether or not this additional expense is really worth including into your business, let’s discuss why and how you should incorporate it into appointment prep to help create the most flawless spray tan ever!

What is Barrier Cream

Barrier cream is exactly what it sounds like! It is a thick lotion, or cream, that is made to act as a barrier on the skin. As we know, spray tan prep instructions alway state that the client should not have anything on their skin for the day of their appointment. The reason we give our clients this instruction is so we can make sure there’s nothing on the skin that can get in the way of the spray tan solution developing correctly. However, barrier cream essentially is made to do that exact thing! It’s made with a thicker viscosity to intentionally act as a barrier that simultaneously adds moisture in order to stop the spray tan solution from over saturating the skin. 

Why Use Barrier Cream

Now you know that barrier cream is used to create a barrier between the spray tan solution and the skin. This is typically the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish during a spray tan, however, barrier cream can be beneficial for specific areas of the body in order to achieve the most natural results possible. Since there are some areas on the body that tend to be more dry, it’s important that we create a barrier and add extra moisture to those areas in order to allow the solution to develop on the skin evenly. Using barrier cream on areas that are notorious for having dry skin will ensure that the solution doesn’t oversaturate or pull orange. 

How To Use Barrier Cream

Barrier Cream is a holy grail product for making sure those hands, feet and wrists look as natural as possible. *Fake tan, where!?* If you neglect to apply barrier cream on these dry areas of the skin, you run the risk of creating a tan that pulls an “orange” tint on those specific areas. Obviously, if the tan pulls orange, not only will your client be extremely unhappy, but it will be a dead giveaway that the tan isn’t real. With that in mind, here are the areas to apply barrier cream on your clients:

• Hands & Palms
• Sides of feet
• Ankles
• Nails on hands and feet
• Birthmarks
• Dark spots
• Elbows
• Knees
• Any other dry spots

Although it’s recommended that clients come to an appointment without anything on their skin, including lotion, barrier cream can be a complete game changer when it comes to prepping your client’s to produce the most natural outcome. Most client’s will have barrier cream applied in the same areas during their skin prep prior to spraying. However, there are some areas that you’ll want to pay attention to based on the client’s individual skin that could also benefit from barrier cream. For example, barrier cream should be applied to any area of the skin that could pull too much solution or create any unevenness in color. This could include any area that is shown to have hyperpigmentation, such as age spots and birthmarks, that will darken up even more once the spray tan is developed. Applying a light layer of barrier cream on these areas will allow the spray tan to develop to a more looking natural depth of color, while helping to even out the overall skin tone of the client. 

Understanding which items to have in your kit and what role they play in creating the results that you and your clients are wanting to produce can set you apart as an artist and expert in your industry! If you haven’t yet stocked your kit with a barrier cream that will give your clients top of the line results, make sure to head over to the Pro Shop on the X-Tan Sunless Website for all your professional sunless kit needs.

Xoxo,

Kelly