Tan Without the Sun at Island in the Sun

By George Walsh, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

If you're seeking to shake that winter pallor, you may want to get an early start on summer and visit Island in the Sun at 4847 Hopyard Road. Island in the Sun is a full service tanning salon that features sun beds, stand-up tanning booths, an assortment of indoor tanning lotions, and DeLaMer swimsuits.

"The owner we bought it from had it for about five and a half years and I took over on November 20th, so it's kind of a new venture for me," says Janis Asmann, owner of Island in the Sun. Asmann and her husband became interested in the business a few years ago, after visiting Island in the Sun. At the time, they mentioned to the owner that if she was ever interested in selling the salon, to give them a call. "Out of the blue, three and a half years later, she called and wanted to sell and wanted to know if we were interested. The timing just happened to be right for us."

The Island in the Sun that's in business now is definitely a new and improved salon. "We went in and remodeled the whole place. We have four Sunol tanning beds and an Orbit high-performance tanning bed and then we have two standups. They're kind of like a sun capsule. People usually stand in them and the lamps go around them."

Island in the Sun employs a total of seven people - not including Asmann - and is currently serving around 400 customers per week. "The girls are getting ready for proms and school dances and people are tired of looking pale," Asmann says. "The sun's starting to shine a little bit, so they really start coming in. It's a good thing that we bought the business in November when we had the time to do our remodeling." At its busiest, Asmann expects that Island in the Sun will bronze up to 800 people a week. In addition to regular customers who patronize Island in the Sun throughout the year, some customers come in a few times to build up a "base tan" before going on a vacation where they'll be beneath the real sun.

Indoor tanning is not the same as outdoor tanning, and a number of technological improvements have been made to the equipment over the years. "I think that sometimes the tanning industry gets a bad rap," Asmann says. "Tanning indoors is controlled. The UVA and the UVB-the bad rays being the UVB-are very limited in the tanning lamps that we use in our beds. Actually, when you go outside to tan, you have to tan for a longer period of time and you don't have any control over the types of rays that your body is getting. In the sunshine, you're going to get what's there: a lot of UVB or a lot of UVA. In the tanning salon, it's controlled. You can only do it for a certain amount of minutes. We look at a person's skin color and skin type and then we use that to determine how long they are going to be tanning."Indoor tanning also offers convenience for those who spend a lot of time beneath the florescent lights of office buildings. "Because I'm located in Hacienda Business Park, I have a lot of people that come from work. They come either at lunch time or right after work to get a little sunshine before they head home." A little bit of sunshine in the spring may just chase away those winter blues.

Photo: Janis Asmann, owner of Island in the Sun, prepares a tanning bed for her next customer.

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