Beauty Salon Lighting: Form and Function

While proper lighting is essential for any consumer-facing space, it’s particularly crucial for both the aesthetics and function of a beauty salon. With salon appointments averaging 45 minutes to 2 hours for women, and 15 to 45 minutes for men, it’s not just the results that matter, but the experience. Both atmosphere and functionality are critical for ensuring a positive experience for your clients, and lighting plays a big role in both. Today, we’ll take a look at what makes lighting important for a beauty salon, and the ways you can use it to keep your clients coming back.

The Importance of Lighting

Client experience in a beauty salon is dependent on two key factors: aesthetics and functionality, with the former referring to overall appearance and atmosphere, the ‘feel’ of the space, and the latter describing its practicality for delivering the service. Lighting is perhaps the single most important element in both:

• Aesthetics: Lighting is key to creating an inviting, cosy atmosphere to help clients relax and enjoy their time in the salon. Colour, temperature, and brightness all play a role in establishing the interior’s feel, along with the incorporation of both natural and artificial light sources to help open up the space, regardless of actual size. 

• Functionality: Existing within a highly visual industry, a beauty salon requires adequate lighting to ensure smooth operation. Stylists need to be able to see what they’re doing, and clients need to be able to judge the results - neither can be achieved with insufficient lighting. 

With these two main principles in mind, let’s take a look at how we can use a tried-and-tested lighting approach to enhance customer experience. 

The Layered Lighting Approach

A reliable way to ensure a coordinated, professional lighting setup for any room is using layered lighting. Unsurprisingly, this is a method of lighting a space that uses several ‘layers’ of light, each serving a distinct purpose. These typically include ambient lighting, the overall illumination of the room, task lighting, dedicated to the function of the space, and accent lighting, for decorative purposes. Here’s how we might go about incorporating each of these layers into a salon’s lighting setup:

• Ambient Lighting: The main way we can set a theme or tone for a beauty salon is via the overall background illumination of the space. Factors such as brightness, colour, and temperature can be controlled to create the desired atmosphere, be it a calming, spa-like environment or a vibrant, energetic vibe. Natural light can also be incorporated for an open, airy feel. As we’re looking to set an overall ambience, this is best achieved with overhead fixtures, which will cast light over the entire room. A single, central light is often enough for smaller salons, while larger spaces will benefit from multiple light sources. 

• Accent Lighting: Additional lighting can be used to highlight specific features of the salon, such as reception areas, artworks and other decorations, as well as displays for any products the salon may stock. Popular forms of accent lighting include track lighting with spotlights that can be individually oriented to draw attention to a specific area, as well as recessed ceiling lighting, and wall sconces. In some cases, the lighting may simply draw attention to itself; a neon sign of the salon’s logo, for example, especially if visible from outside, can go a long way to turn heads and leave an impression on both clients and passers-by. 

• Task Lighting: While lighting for atmosphere and decoration is important, it’s also crucial to provide stylists with suitable lighting for their work. After all, all the atmosphere in the world won’t help if the results are subpar! Overhead pendants, table lamps, or even floor lighting can all help ensure 360-degree clarity for stylists to perform at their best.  

• Vanity Lighting: A subset of task lighting specific to beauty salons, vanity lighting is largely for the benefit of clients. Usually installed as bulbs or bars above or around mirrors, it allows clients to properly judge the results of a stylist’s work, free of shadows or colour distortion, ensuring they can leave with a positive experience that’s likely to keep them coming back. 

Additional Factors

While lighting placement is important, it’s far from the only factor to consider when designing a lighting setup for a salon. Other aspects must be taken into account: 

• Colour and Temperature: When it comes to ambient and decorative lighting, the right colours will depend on the intended theme and ambience of the salon. However, warmer tones between 3000 and 4000K are generally ideal, as they will help create an inviting, relaxing atmosphere for your clients. For task lighting, especially vanity lighting, it’s best to stick with cooler white tones. Remember: balance is important; too much warm light will distort colours, while too much cool light can make the space stark and uninviting.

• Brightness: As with temperature, it’s important to find a suitable middle ground between overly-bright and overly-dim lighting. Dimmer tones are better for the atmosphere-setting purposes of ambient light, while brighter light is suitable for accent (to draw attention more effectively) and task (to provide visual clarity for stylists and clients) lighting. 

Tips 

• Vary Your Lighting: There’s no need for a one-size-fits-all approach to salon lighting. Colour, temperature, and brightness can be varied to suit different areas. For example, warmer, dimmer tones will help create a relaxing ambience for a massage area, while brighter lights are better suited to styling stations. 

• Use the Colour Rendering Index: The Colour Referencing Index (CRI)gauges how accurately an artificial light displays colour compared to natural daylight. A CRI of 80 or higher is best for vanity lighting, particularly for services such as makeup application or hair colour treatment, as it will allow clients to accurately judge the results.

• Use LEDs: More efficient, longer-lasting, and cheaper than alternatives, LED lighting is the way to go. 

• Use Dimmers: Available as manual switches, or remotes such as this one, dimmers allow you to adjust the brightness of a light on the fly, affording a degree of flexibility to adapt lighting to suit a specific service, or a client’s preferences.

• Incorporate Natural Light Where Possible: Sunlight is a great way to open up a space and give a more natural, airy feel, and it’s totally free. Take care to mitigate direct sunlight, however, as excessive glare will make life difficult for stylists and uncomfortable for clients. 

• Diffuse Your Lighting: Diffusion involves covering a light source with a translucent material in order to mitigate glare, smoothing the light out for a more relaxed, mellow finish. Diffusers can include anything from a lampshade over a bulb, to sheer curtains for sunlight, to silicone tubing to blend the individual LEDs together on a neon sign. Diffusion is particularly handy for vanity lighting, as it’s a bit tricky to check yourself out in the mirror if you’re squinting!

• Make it Personal: Personalised lighting can go that extra mile towards leaving an impression on your clients. Bespoke lighting such as a custom neon sign can do a lot to further your brand, as well as help establish a sense of coordination, identity, and professionalism within the salon itself. 

It’s Up to You

Ultimately, there is no such thing as ideal lighting for a beauty salon. Differing themes and atmospheres demand different lighting styles, and only you will know what best suits your business. We hope these tips have helped you get a better idea of the aspects of salon lighting to consider! 

If you’re after a personalised light fixture, check out some of our customisable salon-themed LED neon signs from our business collection. Alternatively, try out our intuitive text designer, or upload your salon's logo for a free quote.