Mariska Nieuwenhuysen was our champion in Europe. She was also our friend.

A tribute from Michael Sjolie and the Sjolie team

Most of you never met Mariska. If you ever bought Sjolie in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, or a dozen other countries, you met her work. If you took a spray tan course anywhere in the Benelux over the last seven years, there’s a good chance you learned from her directly. Mariska Nieuwenhuysen, owner of Spray Tan Solutions in Amersfoort, passed away on October 23, 2026, surrounded by her husband René and her children. She was our distributor. That is the smallest true thing you can say about her.

Mariska found Sjolie before we found her. She ran her own salon, Feel Good Spray Tan, and was already using our solutions on her clients when, in January 2019, her best friend of thirty years handed her the keys to Spray Tan Solutions. The friend, Annelies, wrote to us that Mariska would take the company “to the next level” with her endless energy, her creativity, and her perseverance. We’ve kept that email. Every word of it came true.

Her first year, she grew the business twenty percent. She called every new salon owner personally after their first order and talked to them about what Sjolie could do in their salon. Salons that had used other brands for years switched because Mariska asked them to, and because she was right. She hired a social media coach, did a professional photoshoot, and put her own face on everything, because she believed customers deserved to know who they were dealing with. The photos on this page are from that shoot. That’s the face thousands of European salon owners came to trust.

Then came 2020. Salons across the Netherlands were ordered closed, and Mariska told us later she felt real fear that first week. Then she got to work. She built product-knowledge webinars for salon owners so they could pivot to retail and self-tan and survive the lockdown. Many of them set up their first webshops because of her. She sponsored Miss Beauty of the Netherlands and taught the contestants about self-tanning. That November, a slow month in any normal year, she tripled her sales from the year before. She finished a pandemic year with growth, and wrote to tell us her dream was to bring Sjolie to Germany, France, Italy, and beyond. Within a few years, orders were arriving from Spain, Portugal, and Eastern Europe.

“I got to know Sjolie as a great company… What a warm family you are together! Really something to be very proud of, Mike.”

Mariska, December 2020

She built a training academy and taught it herself, standing behind students at the tent and correcting their hands. She hand-labeled every bottle with Dutch ingredient lists to meet EU regulations, and asked our permission before reprinting a single rack card. She was the most careful, most conscientious partner we have ever had, and the most generous. She left us five-star reviews we never asked for. Her New Year’s emails were addressed to “the entire Sjolie family,” and she meant it.

Mariska was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2021. She went through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, and kept the business running the whole way. In February 2025, she learned the cancer had spread to her bones. She spent ten days in the hospital, came out in a brace from her skull to her pelvis, and within weeks wrote to tell us that Spray Tan Solutions would continue: the webshop, the distribution, the trainings, all of it. “If there is something that will give Mariska energy and strength,” René wrote, “it is this.”

She wasn’t done. In the spring of 2026, she moved her training room to a smaller space and kept teaching, two hours a day, three days a week. René and two friends cleared the entire second floor of their home so she could move the warehouse in and keep shipping. She trained a six-person course over six weeks. Then she and René took their camper van on a trip through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the French Alps, retracing the roads they’d traveled together over twenty-six years of marriage. It was a gift for their twenty-fifth anniversary. She called it a trip down memory lane.

In June of this year, from the middle of all that, she left us one more review. “The business here in Europe is growing fast,” she wrote, “and Sjolie has more and more Sjolie lovers.” That was Mariska. Sick, tired, and still cheering for us.

We use the word “family” a lot at Sjolie, and it can sound like marketing. Mariska is the reason it isn’t. She treated a supplier five thousand miles away like relatives, and taught us to do the same. Every salon she opened to us, every artist she trained, every bottle she labeled by hand is part of Sjolie now, and it always will be.

To René: thank you for carrying so much, for so long, with such grace. To her children: your mother built something real, and she built it with more heart than anyone we have ever worked with. To the salon owners of Europe: she believed in you enough to stay up nights making webinars so your businesses would survive. Keep them alive. That’s her legacy, and now it’s yours.

Spray Tan Solutions continues, exactly as Mariska planned it. After her private funeral, the team and warehouse are taking a short break until November 4, 2026. The phone line is closed from October 23 to November 4; for the first two weeks, email is the best way to reach them, and every email will be answered within two days. You can still order the full Sjolie range: orders placed and paid during the break ship from November 4, with 10% off using the code najaar-break-26. After that, per Mariska’s wishes, the business carries on as it always has, and Sjolie products remain available throughout Europe.

With love and gratitude,
Michael and Ashley Sjolie, and the whole Sjolie team