May 13, 2026 • 12 mins
Strange but true, actor Tippi Hedron kickstsarted the Vietnamese manicure industry in the United States in the 1970s. This is that story.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chucked Cherry's here too, and for Days and this
is short stuff one that ties into a recent episode
of ours raw.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, thanks to the following inside Fullerton website, National
Museum of American History KCR dot com 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
(00:40):
populate the manicure nail professional system like no other group
in the United States.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
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,
(01:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
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 eighty two percent of
nail salons in California are staffed by Vietnamese people, generally
Vietnamese women, but some men are doing that thing too,
(01:42):
And it goes all the way back to nineteen seventy five.
After the Vietnam War ended, Vietnamese immigration happened in a
big way, and I think by the year two thousand
there were a million Vietnamese immigrants had settled in the
United States.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yes, and not all billion, obviously we're working 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 eight billion dollar global
(02:19):
industry in just a few decades.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
You know, before the nineteen seventies, 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
nineteen seventy four, and then acrylic nails came along in
(02:46):
nineteen seventy nine, and that just sort of democratized the
whole thing. It made a lot cheaper to do and
therefore have done for you.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
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 techts realized, like, you
(03:14):
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 slun
you could pretty much open and own your own like this.
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
(03:37):
a nest egg for themselves.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So you know, we mentioned the here was nineteen seventy five,
and the place was something called Hope Village, which was
in Wymar, California, and it was the first non military,
non military refugee camp in the United States. And in
nineteen seventy five there were about twenty Vietnamese women that
were there in Hope Village and at one point actress
(04:02):
Tippy Hedron, who was the starbar and the Star of
Alfred Hitchcock's.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
The Birds, came through.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
And she reached up over her head and went on
the light bulb with her nail and she said, I
got a great idea. Everybody. So she, having being a sta,
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,
(04:51):
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 but Terra founded the Nail Patch and Thencino, California,
which is the setting for the movie, and Sino Man
and Tippy Hedron said, Hey, Dusty, do you want to
(05:12):
come teach these women and Hope Village how to do
some nail stuff because they're crazy about my manicure, So
you want to just have a lark and come come
show them what to do in Dusty six.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, yeah, She's like, I'm Dusty Boots but Terra. The
answer is always yes. So Dusty Boots went up. Their
first training session went really well, and so Tippy Hedron
flew her up basically every weekend over a few months,
you know, while she was still running that nail Patch
and Encino and just kept teaching them like new techniques
(05:45):
and like kind of the all the ins and outs
of the business.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah. So there were I think originally twenty women who
became the first class that Dusty but Terra essentially graduated.
And this was also just he made to be adapted
to actual like beauty schools, beauty colleges in particular. The
first one was Citrus Heights Beauty College, which is well
(06:09):
known for also being the one that Frenchie dropped out
from in Greece. And yeah, no, I just made that.
I just had to give a frenchy shout out, and
that was the only way I could come up with it.
I got you, 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
(06:32):
women from whole village, and train them how to do
this so they can go create a life for themselves.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Now we're on the road driving in your truck. Want
to learn a thing or two from josh Am Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, stop.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
All right, So we're back.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
When we left, Tippy Hedron had gotten Dusty Boots Poterra
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, it's 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
(07:40):
that's because Dusty Boots but Terra's husband, Massimo Massimo. Yeah, yeah,
Massimo Butra was a photographer and like went up there
to this refugee camp and like took lots of like
awesome pictures of this all taking place.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
So yeah, it was pretty well documented. So I think
the first group of twenty women from Camp Hope underwent
three hundred and fifty 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
(08:16):
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,
(08:37):
like this is really where the idea of nail salons
kind of came from. 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 seventies transition.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And just like any ethnic roop 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 you're on to your sister or
somebody or has gone over to the United States. They're
(09:18):
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, right,
and it became Vietnamese dominated. And one of the reasons
I think Becky Hamilton reference 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
(09:38):
they were successful.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah. You ever get a pedicure or a manicure, Nah,
not my thing there, man. You should treat yourself, at
least treat yourself to a pedicure once and I'll bet
you do it more than once.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You told me to do that ten times now, and
I just don't think it's my thing.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
All right, I'm taking you. Sorry, I'll kidnap you if
I have to and take you and you're going to like, Josh,
thanks for this.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
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
(10:31):
do not have any kind of ownership stake in them.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, which is you know, even in California they have
a thirteen dollars an hour minimum wage. This is from
twenty twenty one, and I think that same year the
average for a nail salon worker was ten dollars and
ninety four cents.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
So you know how they getting away with that? That's
what I want to know.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
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.
(11:23):
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 the even worse, traditionally
or typically, when you are reported for this, basically nothing
happens to you as a business owner, all.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Right, So the TLD are is they're being taken advantage of.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
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 and the nail salon.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, so tip them big everybody.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yes, although they are often forced to split their tips
with the ownership, which is pretty crummy.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Well, that's why I get a tip them even bigger.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Yeah, what you do. I've learned this from experience. You
show up with a twenty 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.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Okay, that's all for you.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yep, So you got anything else?
Speaker 3 (12:37):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Short, Stuff's out, everybody.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chucked Cherry's here too, and for Days and this
is short stuff one that ties into a recent episode
of ours raw.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, thanks to the following inside Fullerton website, National
Museum of American History KCR dot com 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
(00:40):
populate the manicure nail professional system like no other group
in the United States.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
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,
(01:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
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 eighty two percent of
nail salons in California are staffed by Vietnamese people, generally
Vietnamese women, but some men are doing that thing too,
(01:42):
And it goes all the way back to nineteen seventy five.
After the Vietnam War ended, Vietnamese immigration happened in a
big way, and I think by the year two thousand
there were a million Vietnamese immigrants had settled in the
United States.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yes, and not all billion, obviously we're working 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 eight billion dollar global
(02:19):
industry in just a few decades.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, it was.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
You know, before the nineteen seventies, 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
nineteen seventy four, and then acrylic nails came along in
(02:46):
nineteen seventy nine, and that just sort of democratized the
whole thing. It made a lot cheaper to do and
therefore have done for you.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
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 techts realized, like, you
(03:14):
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 slun
you could pretty much open and own your own like this.
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
(03:37):
a nest egg for themselves.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So you know, we mentioned the here was nineteen seventy five,
and the place was something called Hope Village, which was
in Wymar, California, and it was the first non military,
non military refugee camp in the United States. And in
nineteen seventy five there were about twenty Vietnamese women that
were there in Hope Village and at one point actress
(04:02):
Tippy Hedron, who was the starbar and the Star of
Alfred Hitchcock's.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
The Birds, came through.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
And she reached up over her head and went on
the light bulb with her nail and she said, I
got a great idea. Everybody. So she, having being a sta,
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,
(04:51):
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 but Terra founded the Nail Patch and Thencino, California,
which is the setting for the movie, and Sino Man
and Tippy Hedron said, Hey, Dusty, do you want to
(05:12):
come teach these women and Hope Village how to do
some nail stuff because they're crazy about my manicure, So
you want to just have a lark and come come
show them what to do in Dusty six.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, yeah, She's like, I'm Dusty Boots but Terra. The
answer is always yes. So Dusty Boots went up. Their
first training session went really well, and so Tippy Hedron
flew her up basically every weekend over a few months,
you know, while she was still running that nail Patch
and Encino and just kept teaching them like new techniques
(05:45):
and like kind of the all the ins and outs
of the business.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah. So there were I think originally twenty women who
became the first class that Dusty but Terra essentially graduated.
And this was also just he made to be adapted
to actual like beauty schools, beauty colleges in particular. The
first one was Citrus Heights Beauty College, which is well
(06:09):
known for also being the one that Frenchie dropped out
from in Greece. And yeah, no, I just made that.
I just had to give a frenchy shout out, and
that was the only way I could come up with it.
I got you, 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
(06:32):
women from whole village, and train them how to do
this so they can go create a life for themselves.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Now we're on the road driving in your truck. Want
to learn a thing or two from josh Am Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, stop.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
All right, So we're back.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
When we left, Tippy Hedron had gotten Dusty Boots Poterra
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, it's 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
(07:40):
that's because Dusty Boots but Terra's husband, Massimo Massimo. Yeah, yeah,
Massimo Butra was a photographer and like went up there
to this refugee camp and like took lots of like
awesome pictures of this all taking place.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
So yeah, it was pretty well documented. So I think
the first group of twenty women from Camp Hope underwent
three hundred and fifty 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
(08:16):
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,
(08:37):
like this is really where the idea of nail salons
kind of came from. 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 seventies transition.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And just like any ethnic roop 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 you're on to your sister or
somebody or has gone over to the United States. They're
(09:18):
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, right,
and it became Vietnamese dominated. And one of the reasons
I think Becky Hamilton reference 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
(09:38):
they were successful.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah. You ever get a pedicure or a manicure, Nah,
not my thing there, man. You should treat yourself, at
least treat yourself to a pedicure once and I'll bet
you do it more than once.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You told me to do that ten times now, and
I just don't think it's my thing.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
All right, I'm taking you. Sorry, I'll kidnap you if
I have to and take you and you're going to like, Josh,
thanks for this.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
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
(10:31):
do not have any kind of ownership stake in them.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, which is you know, even in California they have
a thirteen dollars an hour minimum wage. This is from
twenty twenty one, and I think that same year the
average for a nail salon worker was ten dollars and
ninety four cents.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
So you know how they getting away with that? That's
what I want to know.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
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.
(11:23):
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 the even worse, traditionally
or typically, when you are reported for this, basically nothing
happens to you as a business owner, all.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Right, So the TLD are is they're being taken advantage of.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
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 and the nail salon.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, so tip them big everybody.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yes, although they are often forced to split their tips
with the ownership, which is pretty crummy.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Well, that's why I get a tip them even bigger.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Yeah, what you do. I've learned this from experience. You
show up with a twenty 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.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Okay, that's all for you.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yep, So you got anything else?
Speaker 3 (12:37):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Short, Stuff's out, everybody.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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