Nailing It Down
On a Friday morning things are fairly busy. Four manicurists, including owner Khoa Tran’s wife, Julie Vu, are working at white tables, filing and polishing the nails of customers. Two of the employees are wearing white surgical masks, which they say protect them from the fumes of the nail polish and nail-polish remover as well as from dust.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
According to the trade publication Nails, nail-care businesses took in $6.3 billion in 1997. And Larry Gaynor, head of Nailco Salon Marketplace, a wholesale distributor that keeps statistics on the industry, says that Vietnamese own 30 to 40 percent of those businesses. “They are now a major force in the industry,” says Jim George, president of the World International Nail & Beauty Association in Anaheim.
Many of the Vietnamese who have opened salons here used to own and operate shops in Washington, D.C., or cities in North Carolina, Texas, and California, but many of those cities became saturated with salons, which drove down prices. In contrast, Chicago seemed like virgin territory. The number of Vietnamese shops here has exploded in the last five years. Tam Van Nguyen of the Vietnamese Association of Illinois says there are now 300 to 500 Vietnamese-owned nail salons in the Chicago area. That worries Van Vien, owner of Van’s School of Nail Technology, on West Leland. He thinks that within a few years Chicago will have one or two shops on each block in shopping districts, driving down profits here too.
Not everyone is happy about the salons. “Most of the customer complaints we receive concern Vietnamese-owned nail salons,” says Vi Nelson, spokesperson for the American Beauty Association, a trade association that represents many of the white-owned salons in the Chicago area. She says a lot of the complaints are about the use of methyl methacrylate for nail extensions, a compound the entire industry once used that’s been linked to skin problems and permanent nail deformities. It’s not illegal to use MMA (except in Ohio), though the FDA has issued warnings about the potential side effects. And Vietnamese salon owners counter that once they learned of its dangers they stopped using it.
