The owner of FacePaint.com, Blake Cabot, was joined by the talented face and body painter Tiffany Beckler in a webinar where she talks about universal face painting safety amidst the current pandemic. 

She first talked about her being a cosmetologist and how she has been a face and body painter since she was sixteen. She then talked about wanting to go over the difference between cleaning, disinfection, and sterilization as she believed that a lot of people get that mixed up. 

She said that you may clean both porous and non-porous items with soap and water. But when it comes to disinfection, you can only disinfect non-porous items like the handles of your brush if they are plastic. One of the suggestions that she made on how to disinfect was using a disinfectant solution like bleach water or barbasol to spray down on surfaces to disinfect it or for immersing a non-porous product that you used in it. She recommends, however, to use barbasol instead as it was created for the purpose of it being used in the cosmetology industry as opposed to disinfectant solutions that are used for floors or windows. 

Also, UV box lights don't work as well as cleaning or disinfecting if you don't have a specific one which is a UV-C box light. And even if you have that specific box light she recommends to stick with using disinfectant solutions as there are parts of a product that the UV light may not reach, therefore, making it less efficient than when you clean with a disinfectant solution. 

And if you are going over your kit and you want try to kill some of the bacteria within your paints, you have to remember first that paint is porous. And that you're not going to kill all the bacteria. But if you do want to get rid of some of the bacteria and that you cross contaminated and made a little boo-boo, which is very possible. What you would do  is you want to get a 70% alcohol and spray it on there. Make sure that surface is wet and leave it there for 5 minutes as that is the kill time for the 70% alcohol. Don't use 91% or 99% alcohol as it evaporates too fast to be able to kill what you need. After that 5 minutes is done you can wipe off the alcohol and put it back into your kit. 

She then suggests having a closed lid for a kit so as to create a barrier between the child you are painting and your paints. She then recommends that you already have a sheet set up that has different designs on it so you know what paints to use and the amount of brushes you would need for each child that you paint. 

And that when on the job and you don't have a lot of brushes with you, you can bring 3 containers where you will fill one of them with alcohol and the other two with water. This way you can clean them in between each child that you paint. But you have to throw out the alcohol each time so as to be hygienic.

If you do have a lot of brushes and you know the amount of children you're going to paint in a span of a certain time, what you can do is pre-package the brushes and items that you would use for each child and then disinfect them all once you're done for the day. 

How you would clean your kit in preparation for the next day is that you would throw out all the trash and clean all the brushes and sponges that you used for the day. She went on and said that after washing the brushes you can dip them in hot water for a few minutes which she said was as close to disinfecting it. For the sponges, you can simply throw them in the washing machine and put them in the dryer with the heat setting at its highest. This allows the sponges to be almost disinfected the same way the brushes are with it being dipped in hot water.

The last thing she suggested as a safety measure when painting was that to use hula hoops that are 6 feet apart so that those waiting in line can still observe social distancing. Another thing that she suggested in line with that was to use an app called Waitlist where you can put down the names and phone numbers of the people who would want to be painted and that'll let them know whether they need to fall in line for their turn. This allows you to have 4-5 people at most waiting for their turn to be painted and allows social distancing to still be observed. 

If you'd like to know more in detail what she talked about, you may watch the webinar on the video above.