Privacy Policy

Who we are

This website is operated by Shicel Spa & Salon, a spa and beauty salon in Chatan, Okinawa, Japan. Shicel Spa & Salon decides what information is collected here and what it is used for. Our address, phone number and email are on the Legal Notice page linked at the bottom of this one.

The site shows our treatment menu, lets you send us an enquiry, and lets you book an appointment online. When a deposit is required for a booking, it is paid on this site through a payment provider.

What we collect and what we use it for

Enquiry form: your name, email address, phone number, the treatment you are interested in, your preferred date and your message. We use them to answer your enquiry and arrange your visit. The form reaches us as an email; it is not saved in our database.

Online booking: your name, email address, phone number, the treatments you chose, the date and time of the appointment, the language you booked in, the total price and any deposit, and anything you write in the “Anything we should know?” box. We use them to hold and confirm your appointment, to send you the confirmation, the reminder the day before and your cancellation link, and to keep our own record of the visit. Unlike an enquiry, a booking is stored in our database.

Payments: when a deposit is required, the payment itself is handled by Stripe. Your card details are entered on Stripe’s own page and never reach our servers. We store the payment reference, the amount and the date it was paid.

Messaging apps: if you contact us through Instagram, LINE or WhatsApp, the conversation happens inside those apps and is governed by their own terms and privacy policies, not by this one.

Technical data: to prevent abuse of our forms we temporarily process the IP address of whoever submits them. Our providers also keep short-lived server logs for security.

We do not use any of this for advertising, we do not add you to a mailing list, and we never sell it.

Health information

The notes box on the booking form is optional and free text. If you choose to tell us about allergies, skin conditions, injuries, pregnancy, medication or anything else about your health, that is health information — under Japanese law it counts as “special care-required personal information”, and we only collect it if you give separate, explicit consent by ticking the box next to that field. The box is never ticked for you.

We ask for it for one reason: so that your therapist can adapt a treatment, or decline it, and keep you safe. It is not used for anything else.

It is stored together with your booking record, is seen only by the salon staff who need it to prepare your treatment, and is deleted with that record 24 months after your appointment. You can ask us to delete it sooner, and you can always leave the box empty and tell us in person when you arrive instead.

How long we keep it

Booking records, including anything written in the notes box, are kept for 24 months after the date of the appointment and are then deleted. Cancelled bookings are deleted on the same schedule.

Enquiry emails stay in our mailbox only as long as we need them to answer you and follow up on your visit, and in any case no longer than 12 months.

Where the law requires a record of a payment to be kept for longer, for tax or accounting purposes, we keep only what the law requires and nothing more.

Where your data is kept and who handles it

Bookings are stored in a database hosted by Supabase in Singapore. The rest of the service runs on Render (application server), Cloudflare (website hosting and content delivery), Resend (sending the confirmation, reminder and enquiry emails), Stripe (deposit payments) and a self-hosted Umami instance running on Vercel (visit statistics).

These providers handle the information only to run this website and this booking service on our behalf, under their own contractual and security obligations. None of them is allowed to use it for their own purposes.

Transfers outside Japan

Because of the providers listed above, your information is stored and processed outside Japan: the booking database is in Singapore, and the other providers are established in the United States and run global networks. Data protection rules in those countries are not necessarily the same as in Japan.

By sending an enquiry or completing a booking you agree to your information being handled in this way. If you would rather it did not leave Japan, please book by phone or in person instead — the details are on our Legal Notice page.

Visit statistics

Only if you accept the “visit statistics” option in the cookie banner, we collect anonymous, aggregated statistics with a self-hosted analytics tool (Umami). It does not use cookies, does not build personal profiles, and the data is never shared or sold. If you decline, the statistics script is never loaded.

Cookies

This site uses a single cookie, which stores your answer to the cookie banner. There are no advertising or third-party tracking cookies. You can change your choice at any time from the privacy settings link in the banner.

Your rights

You can ask us at any time to tell you what information we hold about you, to correct it, to add to it, to delete it, or to stop using or sharing it. You can also withdraw a consent you have given — including the consent for health information — and that does not affect anything we did while the consent was in place.

Write to us using the contact details below and we will deal with it. We may ask you a question or two first, to be sure we are talking to the right person before we release or delete anything.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your request, you can complain to the data protection authority with jurisdiction over us.

Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection, booking records are only reachable by salon staff who have signed in, and the public website never queries them directly. The cancellation link we email you contains a secret token: treat it like a password and do not forward it.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information, we update this page and the date shown at the top of it. The version published here is always the one that applies.