As one paper once claimed: “a fallen Saigon raises in the west”

Adele Free Pharm searches the traces of her Vietnamese heritage and connects the dots of the story of the American nail industry.

After 1975, with everything lost, war refugees started going to the United States to find a place to a fresh new start. Whom they were escaping was making space for them. With the help from a godmother: the actress Tippi Hedren, who through a program of job training for refugees flew to teach 20 women manicurist skills and then helped to find the places in salons in California. These women were the start of a community that grew so big that nowadays, being Vietnamese in America you always have someone you know working in the nail business.

On this side of the ocean were these women working together, sheltering the newcomers to make the wait out with a new form of art that even though started as craftsmanship taught to survive, for some of them it developed as a passion.

A ritual to feel good every two weeks. Outwards and Inwards. Nail salons took a start from the hair salons and made little cabinets where long talks took place, unwinding from routine and forming friendships between clients. In every mall, statewide, this little place of communion was formed behind the lace of polish and acrylic smell. 

This niche that outgrown all their competitors had to face backlash and prejudice and stereotypes hard to shake. It merged two strong communities into a fantastic collision when black women adopted the trend and made it even bigger, making a unique cultural mixture and an alliance between communities, all of that making everyone prettier. The American nail business made two eternal bonds hyperbolic: the one between communities and their consequent aesthetic practices and the one between aesthetic practices and the communities formed around them, blossoming from the debris.

Carla Chasco is an art critique specializing in film, from Buenos Aires Argentina, currently studying curatorial studies degree at UNA. She has previously worked as a costume designer but nowadays is advocated the other side of the film.