L’Oréal develops ‘back to business’ safety guidelines for salons in India

Mumbai: L’Oréal India has developed a support guide for Indian salons outlining hygiene and operating guidelines for when businesses are able to reopen. L’Oréal will also help hairdressers exceed the usual salon safety and sanitary measures, to keep themselves and clients safe by supplying masks, hand sanitizers alongside the new operating guidelines. With more than 110 years of professional beauty heritage, L'Oréal is committed to serving as a partner and advocate for the industry.
This ‘Back to Business’ hygiene and safety guide, will be distributed to its 45,000-strong salon network and over 170,000 hair dressers, ahead of lockdown restrictions being lifted. The support guide includes post-lockdown advice around ensuring the safety and wellbeing of customers and employees; safer operating procedures; including hand cleansing, tool disinfecting, salon routing, pre-booking, reorganisation of salons to space out appointments and electronic payment, all to ensure the social distancing requirements. These guidelines are now available to all hairdressers or salon partners of L’Oréal Professional Product brands - L'Oréal Professionnel, Matrix, Kérastase and Cheryl’s Cosmeceuticals.  
The L'Oréal Professional Products Division has been active to keep hairdressers up-to-date on their skills and visible to their clients by providing extensive online training to help upskill them while their businesses are temporarily closed. Over 4,250 e-training sessions have been conducted for 50,000 hairdressers and beauticians in this period. L’Oréal also announced a credit extension for all its distributors and direct salon partners for the period of the lockdown. 
Amit Jain, MD, L’Oréal India said: “The Hairdressing industry is a key source of employment and it is important hair salons get back to business safely, once lockdown restrictions are lifted. The past few months have provided us with even greater awareness of the importance of our hairdressers and the demand from consumers for hair salons reopening is high.”
D. P. Sharma, Director, Professional Products Division, said, “L’Oréal’s Professional Products Division in India has over 170,000 hair dresser partners, operating in over 45,000 salons. We are strongly mobilised to help our salon partners navigate these challenging times, with the primary objective of ensuring the safety of consumers, our partner salons and their employees. We are committed, now more than ever, to our role as partner and advocate of the hair dressing industry and will continue to work tirelessly to lessen the impact of this crisis on them.”
According to a survey by Redquanta, salon visits are among the top 3 activities that people missed the most, with 56% saying they missed going to salons.
Over the years, L’Oréal has actively contributed to the dynamic Indian hairdressing sector. Training and education is the bedrock of the industry and L’Oréal continues to invest a lot in these key development areas, along with upgrading salons through superior products, revolutionising the consumer experience and providing hairdressers with platforms like the Indian Hairdressing Awards, to showcase their talent. L’Oréal has trained over a million hairdressers over the last 10 years and partners with 45,000 salons through its brands L’Oréal Professionnel, Matrix, Kérastase and Cheryl’s Cosmeceuticals.