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

Strange but true, actor Tippi Hedron kickstsarted the Vietnamese manicure industry in the United States in the 1970s. This is that story. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:09Josh Clark?

  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. Rawr.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  That's right. Thanks to the following Inside Fullerton website, National Museum of American History, kcr.com.

• 1:29Josh Clark?

  The Rock.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Dot 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.

• 1:54Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  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% 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.

• 3:02Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  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 that just sort of democratized the whole thing. It made it a lot cheaper to do and therefore have done for you.

• 3:59Josh Clark?

  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, 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.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we mentioned the year was 1975 and the place was something called Hope Village, which was in Wymar, 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 Hedron, 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 lightbulb moments where she's like, wait a minute, I bet I can teach

• 5:29Speaker 03

  these women and empower them to do this and become business owners here in the United States.

• 5:35Josh Clark?

  And she reached up over her head and went tink tink on the lightbulb 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 Hedron said, hey, Dusty, do

• 6:17Josh Clark?

  you want to come teach these women in Hope Village how to do some nail stuff? Because they're crazy about my manicures. So you want to just have a lark and come, come show them what to do? And Dusty said, yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  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 Hedron 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 the all the ins and outs of the business.

• 6:53Josh Clark?

  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.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah?

• 7:20Josh Clark?

  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.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I got you.

• 7:26Josh Clark?

  And the owner, Becky Hamilton, 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.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  That's right. I feel like we should take our little break here.

• 7:46Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  And we'll come back and get to, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story right after this.

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• 10:34Speaker 03

  All right, so we're back. When we left, Tippi Hedren had gotten Dusty Boots Butera on the scene, training these women, and then partnered with Becky Hamilton 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, Massimo, yeah.

• 11:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Massimo Butera was a photographer and like went up there to this refugee camp and like took, took lots of like awesome pictures of this all taking place.

• 11:11Josh Clark?

  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, this seed was planted of this massive transition in the nail salon industry.

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  Again, like this is really where the idea of nail salons kind of came from. Yes, there was the nail patch, but the, 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 seventies transition.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  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, you know, business. That's how it happens, you know? Word goes back to Vietnam like, hey, you know, your aunt or 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.

• 12:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah. You ever get a pedicure or a manicure?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Nah, not my thing.

• 13:01Josh Clark?

  There, man, you should treat yourself, at least treat yourself to a pedicure once and I'll bet you do it more than once.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  You told me to do that 10 times now and I just don't think it's my thing.

• 13:11Josh Clark?

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

• 13:18Speaker 03

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

• 13:27Josh Clark?

  All right, let me think about this then.

• 13:31Josh Clark?

  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 within 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. And actually sadly, they typically make less even than minimum wage. So a lot of nail salon workers are being paid in a legally low amount of money.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is, you know, even in California, they have a $13 an hour minimum wage. Or this is from 2021, and I think that same year, the average for a nail salon worker was $10.94. So, you know, how they getting away with that? That's what I want to know.

• 14:18Josh Clark?

  I looked, basically, you, 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.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  All right, so the TLDR is they're being taken advantage of?

• 15:04Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so tip them big, everybody.

• 15:26Josh Clark?

  Yes, although they are often forced to split their tips with the ownership, which is pretty crummy.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Well, that's why you get to tip them even bigger.

• 15:34Josh Clark?

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

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Okay, that's all for you.

• 15:51Josh Clark?

  Yep. So you got anything else?

• 15:53Speaker 03

  I got nothing else.

• 15:54Josh Clark?

  Short stuff's out, everybody.

• 15:59Speaker 04

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