Alexandra Delaney-Bhattacharya, Ph.D. Researcher examining the representation of white femininity in Bollywood film at Birmingham City University, United Kingdom.
Looking good is big business in the UK. Women spend, on average, over 20% of annual earnings on their appearance, splashing the cash on clothes, beauty products, gym memberships, teeth whitening and makeup. Manicures and pedicures are particularly popular beauty treatments setting customers back between £200 to £450 each year.
In recent years tanning salons hit the headlines with reports that exposure to dangerous ultra violet radiation seriously increases the risk of skin cancer. More recently, nail salons have come under similar accusations of health and safety concerns around ultra violet drying machines, the toxic chemicals used in regular and gel nail polishes, and unhygienic salon practices.
Cheap salons have popped up along high streets throughout the UK with their gaudy advertising signs, scruffy looking interiors and poster demands for “Cash Only”. They are the fast beauty equivalent of our desire for fast fashion, satisfying the UK’s perceived need for cheap and instant gratification, whatever the cost.
Salon workers sit squashed together in these small shop spaces behind overcrowded tables to shape, buffer, and polish nails for as little as £5 for a simple treatment. What was previously a luxurious opportunity to relax with a cup of tea and a gossip with your regular beauty therapist is being replaced by this cheaper and not-to-cheerful experience? The service is on a first come first serve basis and the focus on speed over quality.
The chemicals inside polishes, glues, and removers can be hazardous to customers and salon workers who inhale these products in often poorly ventilated spaces. Particularly dangerous are toluene (a nail polish and glue ingredient made from a liquid occurring in crude oil and linked to reproductive defects), formaldehyde (used in nail polish and a known irritant and possible carcinogen), dibutyl phthalate (linked to reproductive defects and banned in the European Union), methyl acrylate, and butylated hydroxyanisol (classified as a carcinogen). There has not been any long-term study examining the health consequences of regularly inhaling these dangerous chemicals.
In a year-long investigation on nail salons in New York, the New York Times revealed the real cost of cheap and fast manicures. Their report highlighted labor abuses and health concerns, including respiratory illnesses and multiple miscarriages believed to be linked to chemical exposures in poorly ventilated salons. Their stark conclusion was those salon workers, already a vulnerable group, are experiencing poor health outcomes as a consequence of cheap and fast manicures.
Concerning for customers is the use of unsterilized equipment. As soon as one customer leaves, another sits down. The salon worker often doesn’t replace the equipment, meaning nail cuticle cutters are reused or simply wiped clean with a tissue. This risks skin infections, fungal infections, and worse. Product labels can also be misleading and many potentially hazardous products are being used under the radar despite regulatory warnings.
A more inconvenient truth is the worker behind the rarely used pollutant mask. There are an estimated 40 million slaves worldwide and tens of thousands of slaves believed to be in the UK working in car washes, nail salons, and in the sex trade. The risk of modern slavery in cheap nail bars is so high that the UK’s independent anti-trafficking commissioner is proposing a licensing scheme to improve the situation.
Workers from rural areas of South East Asia, particularly Vietnam, pay smugglers to bring them to the UK. Once here their passports are confiscated and are forced to work long hours, sometimes seven days a week, for sometimes as low as £30 per week.
Most women who frequent cheap nail salons would not automatically associate their salon worker with slavery. These workers are out in the open, working in the UK’s high streets, unlike other victims of trafficking. The link is certainly not as obvious as young Eastern European women trapped in the UK’s underground sex trade and forced to live in horrific conditions.
And yet the reality makes for an uncomfortable truth. The cheap salons in the Manchester region, for instance, are staffed almost exclusively by Chinese and Thai workers. Their ability to communicate with customers is low and communication is usually done via a friendly English speaking foreign intermediary. It is unlikely that these workers will have been adequately trained and disconcertingly there is sometimes even a white supervisor responsible for overseeing cash takings and managing the workers.
Our desire for cheap and instant service clearly comes at a cost to our health and the welfare of those who serve us. How much of that cheap £5 manicure will be going to the salon worker who provided it? And when will we realize the real high cost of the fast beauty industry?
