Dianne Drewing in the Monmouth Street mews where she plans to open a spray-tan salon next week. (Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
For most of her life, Dianne Drewing was a tanning nut.
“A perfect day for me was always a day at the beach, tanning with friends or family,” she tells redbankgreen‘s Retail Churn. She even chose a college in Florida in part for the rays.
Then came an awareness of what kind of damage the sun can do to human skin, a lesson amplified when Drewing began noticing its adverse effects on her own skin, which she describes fair.
Demolition work appeared to be underway earlier this week at the future home of a Subway sandwich shop. (Click to enlarge)
That was seven years ago, right around the time a friend persuaded Drewing to set aside her aversion to spray-on tans. The effect was transformative, she said.
She’s been a “sunless client” ever since. But not just any sunless client. Drewing acknowledges that salon owners might be forgiven for regarding her as the client from hell, the perfectionist who insists on an even application of a color that’s natural to her pigmentation. None of that John Boehner orange cast for her.
Now, she’s the one who will be holding the spray nozzle. Next Tuesday, Drewing plans to open Sunkissed Airbrush Tanning in a tiny second-floor space upstairs from That Hot Dog Place, in the alleyway beside the Dublin House on Monmouth Street in Red Bank.
But there’s a twist. This is an all-organic salon, said Drewing. The main ingredient in her aerosol solution, she said, is dihydroxideacetone (DHA), which she describes as “a colorless sugar that reacts with the amino acids of dead skin cells” to produce a different hue of tan in each client, depending on his or her own body chemistry.
“My goal is to never make a client look overdone, but to have the most natural-looking, even tan possible,” she said.
Sunkissed doesn’t use a spray tent, as other salons do, because the noiseless compressor Drewing employs enables her to control the spray, she said.
The salon will offer services from a face-only tan for $12 to full-body, for $38. Package deals for weddings, proms and girls-nights-out are available.
The salon is the first business venture for Drewing, 41. She grew up in Warren and now lives in Tinton Falls. She works as a high school and college English teacher, and plans to be open in the evenings during the school year and all-day during the summer.
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In other Churnings, Lucki Clover opened Wednesday in half the space formerly taken by Zebu Forno, at 20 Broad.
And workers were seen doing early prep work this week in the planned home of Subway Café, a 28-seat “hip” variation on the sandwich shop chain’s usual offerings, at 60 Broad Street, in a long-vacant space between the Red Bank Nail Salon and Hip & Humble Home furnishings.
