Estheticians are so much more than just skilled beauty professionals. They are also therapists, helping clients feel beautiful, inside, as well as out. But these skilled beauty pros work in a risky industry, where one slip of the hand, one miscalculated chemical ratio could severely injure a client and bring about huge liability for the professional esthetician.
To help estheticians find the best insurance programs specifically for beauty pros out there, we’ve created this ultimate esthetician insurance guide. Read on as we deep dive into this vital career protector.
What is Esthetician Insurance?
First off, why do estheticians even need insurance? Well, the law places liability on individuals or businesses when they are legally obligated to pay something. Just merely hanging up the “we’re open” sign out front opens you up to at least one major form of liability most professionals have probably heard of - general liability.
By completing beauty sessions for clients, professionals are also opening themselves up to the other major form of liability - professional liability.
- General liability is related to accidents that cause injuries and/or property damage in or around your place of business. Depending on your state, you can be assigned a level of liability when an accident occurs which will be determined by the courts.
- Equal to general liability for business owners and operators is professional liability. This liability stems from you offering your services to the general public as it relates to an accident with injuries and/or property damage as a result of the actual services you perform as a professional.
Now that we understand what a liability is and the two most common forms of liability for estheticians, we can better understand the vitality of insurance. Insurance literally means a financial assurance for a covered event. You can purchase insurance for many things - your car, your home, even your life. Esthetician insurance provides the financial assurance that the insurance company will cover the costs of a claim, per the provisions of your contract i.e. your insurance policy with them.
With general and professional liability, these types of claims are more common for estheticians and so any esthetician insurance worth its weight will provide large, but adequate, coverage limits for each. Other forms of liability that warrant protection include product liability. The insurance for this type of liability protects the policyholder from a claim against them after a client has had a bad allergic reaction to a particular product that was used in the session. From there, top esthetician insurance programs will also cover additional forms of loss that could present a significant financial risk to a professional if left uncovered.
Going further, today’s beauty pros face increasing cyberthreats that could take years and thousands of dollars to clean up after an attack. Seeing the real risks professionals face, our esthetician insurance program provides $25,000 in identity recovery services should your identity ever be stolen.
Additional protection mechanisms like this make a good policy into a great policy and offers the comprehensive protection needed to adequately protect yourself from the many liabilities and other losses that can occur at any point in a career.
How Do I Get Esthetician Insurance?
Now that we understand the world behind liabilities and the ways that insurance can be used as an effective risk mitigation strategy, the question of securing coverage comes next. Quite often, many consumers will base their entire buying decision on cost. Knowing this, businesses entice customers with all manner of advertising and sales promotions. But going into your esthetician insurance purchasing decision, pros need to be savvy to make sure they’re getting a great policy at a good price.
Esthetician insurance cost should definitely be a consideration but it needs to be taken into context so you can get an accurate picture of how each program compares on a level playing field.
Three key questions to ask with your esthetician insurance program can really affect the overall quality of the coverage that you get:
We put this at number one because it really is that important but is so easily lost in the flurry of signing up for a new policy. Occurrence form is by far the industry’s preferred choice for coverage type within a policy but there are many esthetician insurance programs out there that still use claims made.
Claims made policies say that in order to file for a claim, you have to file that claim while the policy is still in effect. Doesn’t sound too bad just yet, right? But consider this example, it’s December 31st and you have a session with a client. The next day on January 1st your policy expires. On January 2nd, your client informs you of their intent to sue over the injuries they’re saying they sustained from your session. With claims made, since your policy has expired, you wouldn’t be able to file for this claim even though the event occurred when your policy was actually still active.
On the flip side of this is occurrence form, which is what’s used in all BIP insurance policies. With that same example above, you could absolutely still file that claim on January 2nd even though your policy was already expired.
Occurrence form says you can file anytime, but usually up to a certain point (such as a few years) from the expiration date of the policy. We’ve found this type of coverage simply works better in the real world, where claim events don’t cater to the expiration date of your esthetician insurance policy
Another really important consideration that can get lost when you’re looking over the different insurance companies out there for estheticians is just how many services are covered under their base policies. Unfortunately, it's quite common for many programs out there to be specifically catered to only a very select few of services - whether that’s only covering activities related to the non-medical care of skin like facials and makeup or coverage for another division of esthetics like hair styling or nail decorating.
Our program thought that sounded a bit confusing and many professionals out there are offering several different modalities in a single day of practice. It would be a major pain to have to go and consult your policy every time you wanted to add another service you’re qualified to provide to your clients.
With BIP, we have a growing list of more than 350 different modalities that are all simultaneously covered under one comprehensive beauty insurance policy. This way, professionals have the ability to freely choose the best combination of different treatments they can offer to clients, both for the benefit of the clients, and also for the business, as more services means more marketability for the beauty pro looking to succeed.
Okay, so we know we said that cost shouldn’t be the single deciding factor and it shouldn’t but it definitely ranks highly on the list of getting the best value for your investment in insurance. But even here, cost needs to be weighted, relative to what you’re getting in diversity and strength of coverage. Generous coverage limits for the most common types of liabilities like we discussed above, as well as additional protections, should all be rolled into a comprehensive policy and set at a great rate. With all of these factors in mind, a simple cost comparison still yields Beauty Insurance Plus as the best combination of cost and coverage available today.
To help you with some of the legwork of running a cost comparison, our esthetician insurance page includes a side-by-side comparison for each of the leading competitors in beauty insurance. We do this so our members can see for themselves just how the provisions our policies stack up against what else is available, and then with that information in hand, can make the best insurance purchasing decision for their unique situation.
Physically signing up for coverage couldn’t be easier and only takes a few minutes. Just complete the application, check out, and instantly you’ll enjoy full and complete coverage with full access to an entire suite of member benefits, included with every BIP esthetician insurance policy.
Getting Covered with Comprehensive Esthetician Insurance
If you’re looking for the very best protections available with insurance tailor-made for professional estheticians, then BIP was designed just for you.
Great coverage at a great rate that lets you put off worrying about what ifs a future claim may bring and instead focus on providing great services, expanding your business, and being successful as a beauty entrepreneur. Contact our team of licensed agents now for help signing up.
