The beauty business is booming, but as anybody can open a salon how do clients know they're in safe hands? Róisín Ingle reports

A few years ago I went on a mother-and-daughter weekend in the kind of place that used to be called a health farm. It was a pleasant enough few days, marred only by slightly bossy therapists in white coats who insisted on saying "Now ladies" to us every five minutes.

The bedrooms were as functional as a hostel's, the heaters didn't work and staff shortages limited the treatments. In the evening a group of middle-aged woman and I snuck into a tiny smoking room and drank vodka that we'd smuggled in under our dressing gowns. It turned out to be the most relaxing part of the weekend.

Thankfully, establishments offering anything other than total relaxation are now virtually extinct. "It happened in the UK a few years ago, and now health farms as we knew them have died a death," says Jennifer Gorman, a UK-based consultant who has been involved in spas in several hotels in Ireland, pointing out that no-nonsense staff and regimented beauty schedules have given way to luxury spas featuring everything from tropical rain showers to Turkish baths.

Kelly's Resort Hotel, in Rosslare, Co Wexford, has just introduced a sea spa while. In Co Kerry, which is rapidly becoming the spa county of Ireland, Sámas, at Park Hotel Kenmare, and the new spa at the Aghadoe Heights Hotel, in Killarney, are among those offering a level of pampering that used to be available only to Hollywood stars.

Gorman says: "Irish consumers have more choice than ever before when it comes to spa treatments, but I would say there are very few of what I would consider true spas in Ireland. A true spa has water and heat therapies and the very latest beauty innovations. Basically, they are places of utter relaxation where the clients really feel they are entering a whole other world."

There may be only a handful of "true spas", but there are now more than 1,000 beauty salons across the country, varying from one-room facilities in hairdresser's anterooms to vast scented spaces offering every treatment under the sunlamp. The Irish beauty industry is virtually unrecognisable from a decade ago.

People old enough to remember cubicles separated by tatty curtains, dirty towels draped on rusty radiators and rude receptionists more interested in filing their nails than booking your manicure would be hard pressed to find such sorry excuses for beauty salons now.

There is a potential problem, though. "At the moment anyone could set up a beauty salon," says Noiren Carrigg, president of the Irish Beauty Professionals Association. "They probably won't get insurance, but [ otherwise] there is nothing to stop them, and I think we should be safeguarding against that."

Insurance companies cover only salons that can prove their therapists are trained to the highest standards; Carrigg and her association favour tougher legislation and say that all therapists should have licences to practise.

The association has just introduced a star rating for salons, in an effort to raise standards. Carrigg says she still comes across shockingly poor service. The new rating system means salons will be awarded three, four or five stars, depending on the facilities and service they offer. It should allow customers to make more educated decisions about which salon to choose: those with blaring music and inattentive service should not expect to do well.

A client who visited Carrigg's own salon, in Bray, Co Wicklow, said she had been having a Hollywood wax - an increasingly popular and intimate kind of hair-removal treatment - at another salon when a therapist walked into the room, leaving her in full view of a customer outside. "She won't be going back," says Carrigg, unsurprisingly.

She came across another example of shoddy service in the reception area of a different salon recently, when she overheard a receptionist inquire "Bikini line, is it?" of a red-faced customer. "Fortunately, because most Irish salons are fantastic, with top-class treatments and professional therapists, this kind of thing is the exception rather than the rule."

Carrigg began her training 18 years ago, after dropping out of a veterinary course at Trinity College in Dublin. "At the time I had one lipstick, in a shade called peach passion, and thought make-up was a waste of money," she says. Although she started the course on a whim, she quickly grew passionate about it - just as well given that the private college she went to charged about £3,000 (€3,800), a small fortune in those days.

With more graduates than jobs, she worked for a year for nothing, eventually earning £40 (€50) a week. The first salon she joined did its facials on sunloungers and relied on a portable heater for warmth.

In 1990, after a spell in England, she opened a salon in Ireland; the emergence in the past few years of cash-rich, time-poor thirtysomething women required her to double her workforce in 18 months, she says. "Now people book regular appointments, and when you suggest a product to them they buy seven. These days beauty salons cater for all ages and genders. It's a lucrative business."

Training as a beauty therapist is no longer financially prohibitive, via VEC courses such as the one at Senior College Dún Laoghaire, where 400 students are studying for two-year diplomas. "The demand is incredibly high. We could have filled 700 places," says Gillian Byrne, head of the beauty department, which has just introduced a pilot spa course, one of only two in the world.

Most graduates will earn about €10 an hour at first; the pay goes up with more training and experience. "There are some people who treat the course more as a finishing school. People who are not sure what they want to do after school take the course, and it gives them more confidence for whatever path they eventually follow."

The most popular treatments are still manicures, facials and massages; the threat of skin cancer has led to a proliferation of spray-tan facilities in salons up and down the country. Waxes such as the playboy and Brazilian are no longer the preserve of the Hilton sisters, and even colonic irrigation is increasingly popular.

The Irish Beauty Professionals Association encourages clients to ask questions in salons about the treatments they're getting and to complain if they're not happy with the service.

But it's not just the salons who can sometimes lack finesse. One beauty therapist says she isn't sure which kind of customer is worse: "The loud, cigarette-smoking tattooed types or the snootier-than-snooty types. In fact the richer they are the more they expect to get for free. They also think you should have the red carpet out for them. They can be a real pain in the neck, to be honest."

Something that, unlike the beauty industry, will probably never change.

Take the pain out of beauty