As a local family-owned business, we do everything we can to support our Gold Coast community and environment because we believe running a business at the scale of The Lash Spa gives us the responsibility to help in any way we can. It’s our privilege to support the following initiatives:
Breast Cancer Support
We’re always looking for ways we can give back to the community, and since 2021 have been sporadically inviting women who have gone through chemotherapy due to cancer to come in to the salon to be pampered and given a complimentary set of lash extensions when their chemo cycle is over and their lashes begin to grow back. We are now incorporating this as more of a consistent initiative to allow us to better support our community.
Many families have been affected by cancer, including ours, and so we know the massive impact it can have on those going through it both mentally and physically – and since we’re great at lashes, we feels it’s a unique way that we can help them both mentally, thanks to our spa-like atmosphere and all the pampering that we’re known for giving our clients, as well as physically, by drawing attention to their beauty, no mater what their age.
As the hair starts to grow back after the chemotherapy treatments have finished we invite cancer patients in to get their lash extensions done with our team while we pamper them throughout their time with us.
Baby Give Back
Baby Give Back is a fantastic cause, designed to help families with young babies who cannot afford to give their newborn the essentials they need, like formula, nappies, toys and more. Baby give back collect these things through physical and financial donations and distribute them to those in need in our community so that those less fortunate babies will have a great start to life.
We support Baby Give Back with donations where possible, especially on their yearly ‘giving day’ where any donation is multiplied thanks to support from sponsors. We have also done table gifts for their yearly ‘Mothers Day Morning Tea’
Varsity College
Being close neighbours with Varsity College just a few hundred meters down the road, we donate prizes for things like Teachers Day each year, along with donations for backpacks and other school essentials for families going through tough times.
St. Hilda’s School
For the last 3 years we’ve been supporting St. Hilda’s, sponsoring such events as their annual race day with table gifts and sponsorship.
Recycling / Reusing
Plastic Bottles
As a beauty salon, there’s not too much to recycle other than the usual cardboard boxes which go in special ‘cardboard only’ bins for recycling. But we also use several large plastic recyclable bottles daily, so we set these aside and take them down to the specialty TOMRA recycling station where they are then properly recycled.
Currumbin Sanctuary
As a busy lash salon that prioritises hygiene and cleanliness we wash our towels between each client (with energy efficient appliances of course), so we have a large stockpile of towels. We cycle through fresh towels at a rate of around 20 hand-towel sized towels each month and we quickly realised there must be a better use for them rather than adding to landfill…
So, we did some investigating and partnered with the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary animal hospital where we now donate a bag of these towels every month or two. We’ve been doing this since 2020 so have donated quite a large number of towels since then. They then use them mainly to wrap the newborn animals in, like baby kangaroos, koalas and anything else that needs a soft, warm place to stay safe and cosy.
We’ve found this to be a great use of a resource that was previously going to waste.
Tooth Fairy Trays
You may not know this, but eyelash extensions come in small plastic trays. We purchase ours in bulk with 1000 lashes per tray rather than the standard 100, so we use far fewer trays than most salons, however it’s still disposable, non-recyclable plastic. So we wanted a way to at least reuse them.
We came up with the idea of giving them to a local school to use as ‘tooth fairy boxes’. The trays are lined with a piece of paper printed by the school with cute decorations, and when a child loses a baby tooth during a school day, they are given one of these ‘tooth fairy boxes’ to keep it safe until they can get it home to place under their pillow for the tooth fairy to take it away that night.
We think this is a magical way to reuse these previously single-use plastic trays.
Using Bamboo instead of Plastics
Many of the products we use in the salon are single-use items such as micro applicator brushes, cotton tips and lash spoolie brushes. In most salons you’ll see these items with plastic handles, simply because they’re cheaper to buy.
However, as we all know these plastics are horrible for the environment – taking centuries to break down, and turning into micro-plastics in our oceans and drinking water.
So we’ve found suppliers who manufacture higher quality products in bamboo. A natural, eco-friendly material that not only looks amazing but is also good for the environment and breaks down just like other natural materials.
This isn’t a requirement in our industry sadly (you may have noticed cafe’s using cardboard cutlery and straws, and supermarkets using paper bags – because these were made mandatory by the government) – but we think it’s more than worth the added expense to use these eco-friendly disposables wherever possible.