Short Stuff: Did Tippi Hedron start the Vietnamese manicure industry?

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1:06Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here, too, and for Dave. And this is Short Stuff, one that ties into a recent episode of ours. Roar!

1:18Josh Clark:That's right. Thanks to the following Inside Fullerton website, National Museum of American History, KCRA.com. The Rock. OSU.edu. And a website called Viet Salon. And if you're like, that's a funny sounding name. It's not because we're talking about the interesting fact that Vietnamese American and Vietnamese women generally populate the manicure nail professional system like no other group in the United States.

1:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and it's one of those things that you just know that in the United States, even if you don't get your nails done, you just kind of know Vietnamese people tend to be the ones that run and own nail salons. But it's one of those things that you probably have never stopped to ask why. And this is one of those great stories where there's actually a specific answer, a specific date, specific people involved that answer that question why. Like there's an answer to it, not just, well, that's just how it turned out.

2:24Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I do have a stat for you here. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, and this is in California, but this is also true in a lot of the country. But they have the number at 82 percent of nail salons in California are staffed by Vietnamese people, generally Vietnamese women. But some men are doing that thing, too. And it goes all the way back to 1975 after the Vietnam War ended. Vietnamese immigration happened in a big way. And I think by the year 2000, there were a million Vietnamese immigrants had settled in the United States.

2:59Chuck Bryant:Yes. And not all billion, obviously, were working in the nail industry, but enough of them did that the Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnamese Americans who came to start, I guess, essentially dominating the nail salon industry, transformed it from something pretty small and niche into, I think, an$8 billion global industry in just a few decades.

3:25Josh Clark:Yeah, it was, you know, before the 1970s, if you got a manicure or a pedicure, you were probably some wealthy woman who, you know, was doing it as like a luxury service. It wasn't, you know, as routine as it is today. And the fact that it got routine, was for a few reasons. One was the electric file was invented in 1974. And then acrylic nails came along in 1979. And they just sort of democratized the whole thing. It made a lot cheaper to do and therefore have done for you.

3:57Chuck Bryant:Yeah, but even still, we haven't gotten to the reason why so many Vietnamese people have taken over the nail industry and turned it into what it is. For one thing, though, So like the reason that it became like primed for that to happen is that these nail techs realized like you don't actually have to be like conversant in English, let alone fluent. You just have to know a few words and you can not only work in a nail salon, you could pretty much open and own your own. Like that's it was a ready made way for recently arrived immigrants whose lives have been devastated by the Vietnam War to basically start over again and build like a life and a nest egg for themselves.

4:41Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we mentioned the year was 1975 and the place was something called Hope Village, which was in Weimar, California. And it was the first non-military refugee camp in the United States. And in 1975, there were about 20 Vietnamese women that were there in Hope Village. And at one point, actress Tippi Hedren, who was the star of Roar and the star of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, came through. She was doing a lot of humanitarian work at the time and went to visit Hope Village. And during the visit, she noticed that these women were kind of gaga over her manicured nails. and she had one of those light bulb moments where she's like, wait a minute, I bet I can teach these women and empower them to do this and become business owners here in the United States.

5:33Chuck Bryant:And she reached up over her head and went ding, ding on the light bulb with her nail and said, I got a great idea, everybody. So she, having, being a star, got her nails done quite a bit. She went to a place called The Nail Patch. Sounds a little hippie to me, but apparently it was a high-end nail salon, like the first nails-only salon. Because at the time, there was no place to just go get your nails done. It was something you did at a larger salon. But Dusty Boots Butera founded the nail patch in Encino, California, which is the setting for the movie Encino Man. And Tippi Hedren said, hey, Dusty, do you want to come teach these women in Hope Village how to do some nail stuff?

6:19Chuck Bryant:Because they're crazy about my manicures. So you want to just have a lark and come show them what to do? And Dusty said, yeah.

6:27Josh Clark:Yeah, she's like, I'm Dusty Boots Butera. The answer is always yes. So Dusty Boots went up there. First training session went really well. And so Tippi Hedren flew her up basically every weekend over a few months, you know, while she was still running that nail patch in Encino and just kept teaching them like new techniques and like kind of all the ins and outs of the business.

6:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So there were, I think, originally 20 women who became the first class that Dusty Butera essentially graduated. And this was also just ready made to be adapted to actual like beauty schools, beauty colleges. In particular, the first one was Citrus Heights Beauty College, which is well known for also being the one that Frenchie dropped out from in Greece. Oh, yeah? No, I just made that up. I just had to give a Frenchie shout out, and that was the only way I could come up with it.

7:23Josh Clark:I got you.

7:23Chuck Bryant:And the owner, Becky Hambleton, was like, hey, let's figure out how to create a nail manicure curriculum, essentially, so we can take anybody who wants to learn, especially women from Hope Village, and train them how to do this so they can go create a life for themselves.

7:41Josh Clark:That's right. I feel like we should take our little break here. Sure. and we'll come back and get to, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story right after this. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck?

7:58Chuck Bryant:It's Stuff You Should Know. Stuff You Should Know. All right.

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9:08Josh Clark:Chuck and Josh, stuff you should know.

9:17Josh Clark:All right, so we're back. When we left, Tippi Hedren had gotten Dusty Boots Patera on the scene training these women and then partnered with Becky Hambleton of Citrus Heights Beauty College to get a real nail curriculum going. The one thing I don't think we mentioned, which is kind of cool, if you do a little research on this, you'll see a lot of amazing photos. of all of this happening in real time. And that's because Dusty Boots Butera's husband, Massimo Butera, was a photographer and went up there to this refugee camp and took lots of awesome pictures of this all taking place.

9:54Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, it was pretty well documented. So I think the first group of 20 women from Camp Hope underwent 350 hours of training. So when they graduated, they knew everything there is to know about manicures, pedicures, all the cures. And they went out and basically spread this knowledge and started training other women, essentially just enough to hire them. And then like those women gained on the job training. You could also go to beauty colleges now to learn it as well. and this seed was planted of this massive transition in the nail salon industry. Again, like this is really where the idea of nail salons kind of came from.

10:40Chuck Bryant:Yes, there was the nail patch, but the ubiquity of them today, they are everywhere. Sometimes if the strip mall is big enough, they'll have multiple nail salons in there. And like, they're just everywhere. All of this came from this late 70s transition.

10:56Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And just like any ethnic group that moves to another country and kind of maybe from the outside weirdly becomes dominant over a particular part of business, that's how it happens. You know, word goes back to Vietnam like, hey, you know, you're on to your sister or somebody or has gone over to the United States. They're making a great living doing nails. So then they come over and they get taught. And then it just sort of the tendrils sort of spread out from there. And it became Vietnamese dominated. And one of the reasons I think Becky Hamilton referenced was, hey, it wasn't just us in the curriculum and us teaching them, but she was like, they had amazing work ethics, and that's why they were successful.

11:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah. You ever get a pedicure or a manicure?

11:43Josh Clark:Nah, not my thing.

11:45Chuck Bryant:Man, you should treat yourself to a pedicure once, and I'll bet you do it more than once.

11:51Josh Clark:You told me to do that 10 times now, and I just don't think it's my thing.

11:55Chuck Bryant:All right, I'm taking you. Sorry. I'll kidnap you if I have to and take you. And you're going to be like, Josh, thanks for this.

12:02Josh Clark:No, I wouldn't because I don't like people touching my toes. It freaks me out. So you would actually be delivering kind of a horror experience for me.

12:10Chuck Bryant:All right. Let me think about this then. So, Chuck, this is not all just necessarily like hip, hip, hooray for nail salons. There's definitely some downsides to it. if you really kind of want to make it in America in nail salons, you essentially have to own your own. And most of the people who work at nail salons do not have any kind of ownership stake in them. Actually, sadly, they typically make less even than minimum wage. So a lot of nail salon workers are being paid an illegally low amount of money.

12:46Josh Clark:Yeah, which is, you know, Even in California, they have a$13 an hour minimum wage. This is from 2021. And I think that same year, the average for a nail salon worker was$10.94. So, you know, how did they get away with that? That's what I want to know.

13:02Chuck Bryant:I looked. Basically, someone has to report you. And from what I understand, a lot of nail salon workers barely speak English in some cases or just don't at all. so there's no way for them to report. And then secondly, they might not know where to start with reporting. And then also thirdly, this is their job and they depend on this job as little as they're paid. So they're probably not going to start causing trouble or rocking the boat or whatever. And then even worse, traditionally or typically, when you are reported for this, basically nothing happens to you as a business owner. All right.

13:44Josh Clark:Right. So the TLDR is they're being taken advantage of.

13:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it happens. And certainly it's not all nail salons, but it is something that is pretty rampant in that industry. And then at all nail salons, there's a real health risk with respiratory difficulties from all of the chemicals that are used in there and just are in the air. It's just part of the air in a nail salon. Yeah.

14:08Josh Clark:So tip them big, everybody.

14:09Chuck Bryant:Yes, although they are often forced to split their tips with the ownership, which is pretty crummy.

14:15Josh Clark:Well, that's why you get a tip of them even bigger.

14:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah, what you do, I've learned this from experience, you show up with a 20 jam between your big toe and your second toe. And when they take your shoe off, you just wink at them. They get it. They understand.