Deep Tan Means Success, Says Salon Owner, Who Appeals to Yuppie Psyche

Last year an idea began to dawn in Mike Guidi’s mind, and soon it was sizzling like beach flesh. “A tan means success in Newport Beach,” explained Guidi, who has a doctorate in psychology. “Tan means leisure time, and leisure time means success.”

But Newport “is yuppie heaven,” he said, and in reality those yuppies are “working their butts off just like the rest of us.”

“People down here work 18 hours a day,” Guidi said. “The guy will be a broker, and he’s running around doing three or four meetings all day long, all night long. He doesn’t have a chance to get in the sun. OK?”

OK, but so far it was nothing new. Tanning salons have been around for years based on that premise.

Guidi gave it a little more thought, however, and devised an unusual hypothesis: The ideal location for a tanning salon was near the beach. That way, he said, the demand for artificial tans would continue even through summer.

Come again?

Well, if you’re tan in the winter, thereby projecting an image of affluent leisure and off-season travel, you’d better make sure you’re also tan in the summer, when a tan is to be expected. Especially when you’re near the beach, where everyone is tan, Guidi said.

Those people will come to him, Guidi reasoned. The apparent contradiction of importing sun to Newport can be dismissed, he said. “If you go to Palm Springs, tanning salons are successful, because nobody in Palm Springs wants to lay in the damned sun,” he said.

“I got a condo in Palm Desert. Why am I going to lay on my butt in the sun when I could go out and be doing what I want to?”

So last August, Guidi, 41, who lives in Laguna Beach, opened the Four Seasons tanning salon on East Coast Highway in Corona del Mar.

He waited months for a Corona del Mar location, he said. “Newport would have been adequate, but it didn’t have the same--well, Corona del Mar is becoming the next Rodeo Drive . . . you know--your major, better area.”

He was looking, he said, for a business facade that “looks like it could be from the South of France. My feeling is, if you have it, you don’t have to flaunt it. Most people would think this is a high-tech hair salon.”

Then the interior decoration was carefully designed. “It’s not your normal salon,” Guidi said. “It was created with that clientele in mind. The decor is kind of called ‘yuppie soothing.’

“You’ll see it’s mauve and charcoal. It’s the in colors. It’s soothing to you. In other words, I didn’t think I’d come into this area and go oak and green carpet.”

Then there is the extra service, Guidi said. From the lobby with the hand-painted wallpaper, black sofas and potted trees, you are escorted to your private tanning booth containing a tanning “bed,” a coffinlike contraption that shines tanning rays over your entire body.

“In a lot of salons, you have to wipe your own bed. You don’t need to worry about that here. We got a sign that says: ‘Your bed is sanitized,’ ” Guidi said.

While tanning, you can listen to any of four prerecorded channels of music and comedy. And when you come out, you can sip a complimentary Perrier or Diet Coke in the lobby.

Each tanning session costs $10, but most people buy a block of sessions--10 for $60 or 20 for $100, Guidi said. Sessions range from 10 to 20 minutes, depending on a person’s skin type.

Couples going on vacation come in so they can step off the plane in Honolulu already bronzed, Guidi said. Crowds of schoolgirls have appeared needing emergency tans for school dances or parties.

“If you can give me four days in a row, you’ll be tan,” Guidi said. “You’d look like you’d been somewhere. Three days, and I get you something where people’ll ask you where you have been.”

With the salon’s first summer in full swing, has his hypothesis been proved?

“Hopefully, it seems to be paying off,” he said. “We have one guy here who comes over and gives me a flat check every month for his eight employees. He wants them tan. It’s a mortgage brokerage.”

The summer is slow compared to winter and spring, however, and that makes Guidi think of the potential gold mine just up East Coast Highway--Newport Center.

“We have that big corporate structure over there, which is a mecca, you know, a big business area. You start doing that, start corporate rates, packages and stuff, and you can really start recycling people in.”

Guidi said that he believes the potential clientele exists. “Men are more vain than women. They just don’t tell anybody. . . . They’re a little more tentative about coming in, because they don’t want people to know that they’re getting their tan from a tanning salon.”

So the jury still is out, not only on whether Guidi can spark a summer indoor-tanning craze, but also on whether he will remain in the business.

Guidi, who’s licensed to counsel children, families and married couples, said that he isn’t feeling any heat from family to drop the tanning operation. He was married once, and “that was enough.”

But keeping the salon “is in question right now,” Guidi said, though he isn’t contemplating a career in counseling. “I’m a developer down in San Diego, and we have a real estate office and a travel agency. . . . I use this (salon) for a cash flow--my partner and I.”

Yet, he added, he has faith in the future of the tanning business, even when it’s in direct competition with the sun.

“Californians think they look better tanned,” Guidi said. “I think it’s probably one of the reasons we’re all neurotic out here, because it’s always sunny and you always have to do something.”

Or at least look like it.