The High Price of Beauty (Page 3)

The one thing scientists, advocates, industry and government agencies agree on is that more education about "best practices" is crucial to avoiding, or at least minimizing, health problems. But it's a stopgap measure, passing the buck to the technicians--who have the least control over the situation. "Education only goes so far," says Meyer. "It shouldn't be incumbent on the workers to be their own protectors."

Especially because making "best practices" happen in the real world is a complicated process for this workforce, whose average salary is less than $17,000 per year; many rent booths or work on commission, meaning traditional workers' rights laws don't protect them. About 40 percent of nail technicians are Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom don't speak much English and earn as little as $50 for an eight- to ten-hour day.

In California, where 80 percent of the state's 80,000 technicians are Vietnamese, advocates are working on filling the research and education gaps through a coalition of nonprofits called the California Healthy Nail Salons Collaborative. They plan to publish the first baseline study of nail salon workers' health. Community advocate Lenh Tsan makes weekly visits to hundreds of salons in the Bay Area, toting a rolling suitcase filled with rubber gloves, face masks and incense to test air circulation, and collecting reports of eye infections, skin rashes, asthma, headaches, nausea and dizziness. She encourages workers and owners to come together to improve conditions, but it's slow going. "There's a lot of fear," Tsan says. "It takes several visits before they get comfortable enough to tell us what's going on."

"My community is suffering silent," says C.M. Nguyen, 47, a Vietnamese immigrant and salon worker Tsan recruited to help. "They have lots of concerns, but they don't like me to speak out." Tsan thinks the problem is partly cultural: "In Asian culture, you're taught to be very respectful of hierarchy," she explains. "It's hard for these women to speak up. So if your boss doesn't care about chemicals and safety, why should you?"

It's also just plain bad for business. Owners and workers alike are concerned about how customers will respond to nail technicians wearing carbon filter masks and gloves, as well as the expense of installing better ventilation systems. And the industry's huge growth makes for cutthroat competition. In Oakland, eleven nail salons crowd into a five-block stretch of Grand Avenue. "I'm trying to get everyone around here to agree to raise their prices by $2, but I don't know if they'll do it," says Jeannie, a 23-year-old nail technician who runs one of the salons with her mother. They both suffer constant allergies and want to switch from generic products to safer, more expensive brands of polish and acrylic. But long work days and relentless worries about making the rent on their salon make it hard to find time or money for changes.

Non-Vietnamese salons feel the pressure too. Horton says that when she quit, her co-workers didn't want to hear it: "They like their salons, they like their gossip, they're in denial about what's going on." What many US workers do get fired up about are the "discount chop shops" stealing their business. "The technicians that are going to get sick are those girls who are normally of Oriental background. They are not well trained, they don't get the education and they have very poor work habits," says Long Island-based Debbie Doerlamm, who runs beautytech.com. Nguyen isn't surprised: "It's like a cold war between us."

The Collaborative's biggest victory is the Safe Cosmetics Act, passed by the California State Assembly in 2005 after a handful of salon workers testified--as beauty industry lobbyists passed out bags of free makeup. The law, which went into effect January 1, is the first of its kind and requires manufacturers to disclose all potentially harmful product ingredients to the state health department. The State of Washington is considering a similar bill, and advocates hope the state-by-state approach will inspire more companies to voluntarily reformulate all their products. But there's no question that what salon workers really need is a federal law requiring the FDA, EPA and OSHA to hold the beauty industry to a much tougher standard, and more scientific research to pin down exactly what they're up against. Until then, a handful of hard-to-impose "best practices" is the only protection we can offer these workers, who didn't realize that painting nails would mean putting their health on the line.

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