Regulating the American Dream
Tippi Hedron’s legacy of empowered women vs. NY’s legacy of burdensome rules
By Ari Weaver
It was the mid-1970s. The fall of Saigon and the subsequent ending of the Vietnam War had launched a mass influx of Vietnamese immigrants into southern California. Safe now from the ravages of war, Vietnamese refugees faced a new challenge: earning a living in their new country.
American actress Tippi Hedron was a Lutheran girl who had made it big in 1960’s Hollywood. Hedren, as lovely on the inside as the outside, was also an international relief coordinator with the faith-based charity Food for the Hungry, and in that role found herself working with Vietnamese women in a refugee center in Sacramento. The women had fled from a dictatorship. They had nothing but themselves, and what they could carry. They needed options. While she brainstormed with them how they could make a living in the US, they kept admiring her immaculately-groomed nails.
They asked how to become manicurists. Ms. Hedren, at her own expense, flew her own manicurist up to Sacramento, week after week, to train the women in basic nail care, pedicures, manicures, acrylic nails and silk-wrapped nails. Forty years later, Ms. Hedren is still lovely, and the women she helped are still professional manicurists.
The Vietnamese refugees she helped train in the most exquisite- and most expensive- nail work were hired at the best salons on the West Coast. They were able to support their families, while holding stable, prestigious jobs.The refugees who followed them to America also followed them into the salon business.
One couple founded a beauty school focusing on nail care, a low price margin segment of a beauty school curriculum. They offered the classes in both Vietnamese and English. From this, they sent their son through medical school. This is a typical story.
45% of all the manicurists in the United States are Vietnamese. 14% of the GDP in Vietnam, today, is from transfer earnings from expatriates. A huge amount of this money is from Vietnamese nail technicians employed in the US.
California, at the time, had a wildly open capitalistic society. Immigrants, set up all sorts of service businesses- weight-lifting magazines, nail salons, brick-laying services. Koreans followed the Vietnamese into nail care.
America has found ways to make turn decorating some of the smallest areas on one’s body- fingertips- into a $7.3 billion ( yes, B) dollar industry.
Manicures had started at around $80 for a set of nails. The entrepreneurs found ways to charge less money for the same service in strip malls. Later immigrants travelled to other states, opening nail salons.
A religious charity and a genuinely good woman assisted legal refugees in learning a new trade. After that, aspiring nail techs attended beauty school, and then earned licenses from the state, and then went on to stable, respected careers. This is the California version of the story and a best-case scenario of American hospitality to legal migrants.
New York City follows a different system, to the horror of a reporter at the New York Times, who wrote an expose about the plight of manicurists in New York City salons. Unlike Hedren’s plan, illegal immigrants pay a nominal fee to go through a three month informal unpaid internship. They work 12-hour days, the same as nurses in training, or full-time EMTs. At the end of the 90 to 100 days, if they have learned how to do a basic manicure or pedicure, they are hired by salons.
Among the hidden customs are how new manicurists get started. Most must hand over cash — usually $100 to $200, but sometimes much more — as a training fee. Weeks or months of work in a kind of unpaid apprenticeship follows.
One such apprentice, Ms. Ren, spent almost three months painting on pedicures and slathering feet with paraffin wax before one afternoon in the late summer when her boss drew her into a waxing room and told her she would finally be paid.
“I just burst into laughter unconsciously,” Ms. Ren said. “I have been working for so long while making zero money; now finally my hard work paid off.”
While the state requires a license, none of the manicurists interviewed in the articles mention a state license. They begin working while doing the simplest jobs- sweeping up toenail clippings, the same way that Vidal Sassoon started by sweeping up fronds of leftover hair at a salon. They work their way up, and learn as they go, as far as they would like to go.
A second newspaper article covers the health threats faced by the mostly female, mostly illegal immigrant, mostly poor, nail care workers. They have nose-bleeds, they get warts, they lose pregnancies, they develop lung diseases. This is where Governor Cuomo sprung into action, insisting on emergency measures to force every break room at every salon to feature “public health clinic lecture” decor.
The obvious villain fingered in the article is dust from sculpted acrylic.
The women are, again, mostly illegal immigrants from poor agricultural regions. They aren’t so poor that they are living on the organic, medieval farms of environmentalists’ fantasies. They live in the Third World, where corporations sell out-dated, dangerous farming chemicals to people who cannot apply the fertilizers or weed control safely, or in a timely fashion — or so every left-wing environmentalist fundraiser letter asserts. They work in factories with non-existent safety systems, breathing in all the dust we’ve banned from sweatshops for nearly one hundred years. They smoke prolifically, according to the World Health Organization — and if they don’t, their parents or husbands do. Unfiltered, cheap, burning-rope cigarettes, the sort that Don Draper so heroically stood against in the sixties.
They don’t have the squeaky-clean internal organs we’d expect. They’ve got the eye-bleeding rates of miscarriage and stillbirth rates of any other agricultural backwater female, even after they immigrate. Nail workers lose babies. Pakistani immigrants in England lose babies. Muslim mothers in Norway lose babies.
The fate of their lost children here is, again, heartbreaking. However, they wouldn’t be in better shape back where they came from, nor would their children. The nationalities mentioned in the various news articles are: Vietnamese, Korean, Honduran, Costa Rican, Chinese. The Vietnamese ran from a genocidal dictatorship of the proletariat. The Hondurans are currently shipping their children, alone, unsupervised, and unattended, through Mexico, and into federal immigration stations. The Costa Ricans already have stunning rates of birth defects, even if they remain at home. The Koreans, mentioned as being supreme in New York, work 12–14 hour days, exactly as if they were a pop-star in training in South Korea. Or, really, anything in South Korea- 12–14 hour days of study while a student, 12–14 days at a factory, 12–14 hour days as a golf pro…
The women are gambling that there is enough money in the American economy that a landless, friendless stray, here illegally, not even speaking the language, can make enough of a go of it to raise wealthy, safe, healthy children. It’s not an unreasonable dream. Toni Ko, millionaire founder of NYX cosmetics, grew up playing in the back of her mother’s nail salon in Los Angeles. Michelle Phan was raised by her Vietnamese nail tech mother in Florida. She, too, is a millionaire entrepreneur. She leapt to fame from her Youtube videos. L’ancome hired her, since more people watched her put on makeup in her bedroom, than watched professional makeup artists adorn famous models in Paris. Michelle Phan built her style of presentation on Bob Ross’ (a retired military veteran) public television show about painting.
These current attacks on inexpensive nail salons tucked into non-descript neighborhoods are a modern version of sumptuary laws. The nail technicians out west, when faced with nosebleeds from harsh chemical odors, worked with professional cosmetic chemists to formulate what are known as “3 Free” and “5 Free” nail varnish formulas. The trendiest nail lines — Deborah Lippmann,Chanel, DeLush and Flower by Drew Barrymore — are all 3- free. The marvelous formulas and professional nail designs in really creative modes are a form of mass affluence. This comparable to the extraordinary proliferation of low-cost hair salons when the government lifted wage and price controls on hair groomers.
The current governor of New York sees a new way to regulate a growing industry catering to middle class women. His regulations won’t solve anyone’s problems. In 1907 the president, a former governor of New York state signed the Lacey Act, regulating an industry catering to women. Roosevelt, in his very high-minded way, signed a law making it illegal to hunt certain birds in order to harvest their feathers. The feathers were used to decorate women’s hats. Wealthy women had worn hats the size of cartwheels loaded down with all sorts of plumage for decades. Middle-class women, relatively wealthier in the manufacturing boom of the early century, had taken to wearing hats with expensive feather ornaments for a few years. These ornaments are still outlawed by Roosevelt’s decree. Yet, the endangered birds are, over a hundred years later, still endangered. The birds not covered under the Lacey Act — pigeons, chickens, emus, and ostriches — are flourishing.
The older polish formulas were just as irritating, but they weren’t used to bring a splash of pleasure to regular women’s lives, nor were they really used to enrich a new wave of minority immigrants east of the Appalachians. Forgive me if I wonder whether the coming regulations are really a way for the government to make life difficult for people who the self- proclaimed elite consider tacky.
