Saturday 4 Jun 2016 6:12 p.m.
The Registered beauty Therapists Association say New Zealand is in desperate need of a quick beauty fix, in the form of regulation.
It follows Sarah Tyson's post on Facebook this week that her eyelids were glued shut while she was getting eyelash extensions, and the operator had to cut them open.
She's not alone. More than 5000 people have shared Ms Tyson's Facebook post with their own stories of beauty blunders.
Reporters from the UK and Europe have even been in touch, all because Ms Tyson claims false eyelashes were wrongly glued in clumps and attached to her eyelids, instead of her lashes, by staff in a west Auckland salon.
"She said, 'You don't usually have to put the remover in your actual eye,' but since it was completely glued to my eyelid then, she had to put it in the eye, which felt almost like peroxide. It was so painful."
The owner of the salon has told Newshub there may have been some discomfort at the most but denies there was any serious issue.
Over in east Auckland, Cheyanne Matthews says she had a similar problem when she and her cousins went to get eyelash extensions at a different salon. Her left eye was glued shut and staff worked for up to 30 minutes to prise it back open.
"I was like, do I need to go to the hospital? I was freaking out. I didn't know what to do and then she put nail polish remover in my eye."
Julie Martin is with the Association of Registered Beauty Therapists and says she's often inundated by complaints about dodgy operators.
"The complaints are becoming more serious and they're becoming more diverse."
There are more than 700 registered beauty therapists in this country who are qualified and quality checked. But for certain treatments, there's no requirement to have any training at all, so anyone can do it.
Ms Martin says the industry desperately needs regulation.
"We have approached the Minister of Health on numerous occasions pointing out the complaints we are receiving and we get no effective response at all," says Ms Martin.
The Association would like to see tighter rules imposed by councils.
Auckland Council does require some services to be licensed, but only if it's a treatment that can pierce the skin, like tattooing, or potentially break the skin. Waxing, manicures and pedicures fall under that category, but eyelash extensions do not.
However, Worksafe can press charges if something goes wrong. It has told Newshub they have been notified about the salon referenced in Ms Tyson's Facebook post.
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