Photography Tips · Brussels

The 12 photos every beauty salon website needs

By Dmytro Derkach · Brussels-based commercial photographer

It's tempting to open a salon website with the price list. Clients don't read it first. Someone scrolling through salons late in the evening is really asking whether the place is clean and quiet, and whether she'd feel at ease with the people there. Twelve photos can settle that before she reads a word.

Start with the room while it's still empty

I like to start before the first appointment. The reception desk first, then the main working area. Then one corner that tells you something about the mood. At a salon I photographed in Brussels it was a teal marble wall behind a grey sofa, which nobody would put in a list of selling points. To me it said more about the place than the menu did.

Those first frames do most of the work on Google Maps. People flick between salons there in seconds, and a dark, cluttered first photo just sends them to the next pin on the map.

Then the people

One portrait per specialist, plus a group photo and someone actually working with a client. In that salon the team wore matching black aprons, and if I could keep only one picture from the whole day it would be the group shot. You book with someone you feel you already know.

Same light and same background for every portrait, otherwise the page looks like it was put together over several years (which it often was). If somebody doesn't want to be photographed, shoot their hands at work instead. A gap on the team page looks worse.

Treatments, without putting the client on show

This is the tricky part. Clients are curious, owners are nervous, and both are right. Show what really happens in your signature treatments, a facial or a colour session, but frame it around the work rather than the client: gloved hands with a dye brush, a profile half under a towel, a nail under the lamp.

Anyone recognisable signs a written consent before the photos go online. Arrange the models before the day. A regular client or a friend of the team is much easier than asking a stranger in the chair.

The small things that explain your price

A shelf of nail polish sorted by colour. A glass teapot on the counter. None of it shouts "premium", and that's why it works: the client notices the care herself and makes up her own mind about your prices.

I usually end with a result or two, shot in the same light as everything else, so it looks like your salon and not like a magazine ad.

Phone photos or one planned session

Phone photos are a perfectly good start, especially for Instagram. The trouble shows up later: pictures taken on different days, in different light, look like different salons once they sit side by side on a website.

If you want the website, the Google profile and Instagram to look like one place, it's simpler to do it in one planned session than to collect it piece by piece. To see what a commercial session includes, have a look at commercial photography and the price list.