Beauty’s law is drawn at the skin, and every state draws the line somewhere else.
A salon, a nail bar and a tattoo studio can share one shopfront and still answer to different Acts. What decides which law reaches a beauty business is not the name of the trade but the work itself: whether a service goes through the skin, uses light, or stays on the surface. This page draws that line, and sets every service the law reaches against the states that reach it.
General information about the law for beauty businesses in each state, not legal or health advice. Your council or state health department has the final word.
Letters, left to right: N New South Wales, V Victoria, Q Queensland, W Western Australia, S South Australia, T Tasmania, A the ACT, NT the Northern Territory.
A solid letter: the state's law asks something of that work.
An outlined letter: the state's skin penetration law leaves it out, or, for lasers and IPL, ARPANSA's list shows no licensing there. Other rules may still apply.
A blank: nothing is held here either way, so ask the state.
Each service below the line is set against the same four states: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia.
Along the line
The surface work is where the law is thinnest, and where its edges differ most. New South Wales says hairdressing and other grooming practices that do not deliberately pierce the skin are not regulated under its skin penetration legislation, though the same practices may fall under a council's rules, and its local government regulation sets the standards for hairdressers' shops and beauty salons that a council can order a business to meet.
In Victoria, a hairdressing business, or a business that applies cosmetics without skin penetration or tattooing, may register its premises on an ongoing basis rather than a periodic one, but not if it also conducts another business the Act lists, such as beauty therapy, skin penetration or tattooing, at the same premises; the Department of Health's own guidance puts beauty therapy, cosmetic applications, hairdressing, skin penetration and tattooing in the same registration scheme.
Queensland folds hairdressing and beauty therapy into one Act as personal appearance services, with a duty to take all reasonable precautions and care to minimise infection risk, and leaves them outside the licence it keeps for higher risk work.
Nails are where the surface stops being simple. NSW Health lists manicures and pedicures among the procedures that can involve skin penetration, and the state's notification form lists them among the procedures a business notifies. Victoria's beauty therapy definition takes in a manicure or pedicure and the application or mending of artificial nails; Queensland's takes in the same two.
Through the skin
Under the line, the states agree that something changes and disagree about what. New South Wales defines a skin penetration procedure by its own words, then declares in its regulation that colonic lavage is one and laser hair removal is not; the occupier of premises where such procedures are carried out must notify the local council before they begin, and must notify a change of particulars within 7 days.
Victoria's Act keeps three classes that matter here, skin penetration, tattooing and beauty therapy, each defined in the Act itself, and a business conducting any of them registers its premises with the council. Its beauty therapy class takes in epilation by electrolysis or hot or cold wax, and its tattooing class takes in semi-permanent make-up.
Queensland defines skin penetration by what it is intended to do, to alter or enhance a person's appearance, and licenses only the services it calls higher risk: body piercing, tattooing and related work, with tattoo removal prescribed as a higher risk service by regulation. Waxing it counts as beauty therapy, not a higher risk service.
Western Australia's regulations adopt a code of practice and apply as if they were a local law, and the code's definition runs over piercing, cutting, puncturing, tearing and shaving of skin, mucous membrane or the conjunctiva of the eye; its own beauty therapy requirements cover wax and electrolysis needles.
Tasmania's Public Health Act 1997 gives the Director of Public Health the power to require, by public notice, that premises where a public health risk activity is carried out be registered, and that a person carrying out such an activity be licensed.
South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory are not set out here, and below the line their letters are blank. For those three this page has nothing to state, so the drawing shows a blank, and the honest next step is the state or territory health department's own page.
Is waxing skin penetration, state by state
Cosmetic tattooing and body art tattooing: two different laws
Light
Above the line the law changes hands. In Victoria, conducting a commercial tanning practice is an offence under the Radiation Act 2005, with a penalty of 60 penalty units for a person and 300 for a body corporate; the Act as amended by the Radiation Amendment Act 2013, which was assented to on 22 October 2013, commenced in two stages, sections 4 to 10 and 12 to 25 on 1 June 2014, and sections 11 and 26 on 1 January 2015, and from the commencement of section 11 the Secretary must cancel a management licence authorising a radiation practice involving a tanning unit.
Queensland writes the ban differently: its Radiation Safety Regulation 2021 prescribes a relevant solarium as a banned radiation source for possession, and its definition of a relevant solarium leaves out a solarium owned by an individual and not used for a business.
Cosmetic lasers and IPL are a national picture rather than a state one. ARPANSA's page, as it stood in October 2026, listed cosmetic lasers as regulated only in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia, and IPL only in Tasmania; in the remaining states and territories it listed no licensing requirements at all.
Where this guide stops
Cosmetic injectables are medical, and this page stops before them. NSW Health's beauty treatment page says prescription-only medicines given by injection, such as botulinum toxin and injectable dermal fillers, can only be administered by a registered medical practitioner or a nurse practitioner. Read NSW Health's beauty treatment page.