Push for healthier nail salons makes progress in California

OAKLAND, Calif. - It was the swagbags that convinced community health organizer Julia Liou to redraw the battle plan in a fight to reduce the hazardous chemical exposures of nail-salon workers, most of them low-paid Asian immigrant women.

In 2005, Liou watched at California’s state Capitol as dozens of lobbyists gave away bags of lipsticks and other beauty goodies to excited legislative staffers.

It was part of the beauty and chemical industries’ effort to defeat a bill to ban one of the thousands of industrial compounds used to make manicures and pedicures prettier and longer-lasting.

Liou and her colleagues lost on that bill. But the state Capitol cluster-swag emerged as a defining lesson for Liou, underscoring how hard it would always be to go lobbyist-for-lobbyist against the U.S. beauty industry, with its $62 billion in estimated revenue last year.

That episode has given rise to a San Francisco Bay Area grass-roots campaign of salon workers, health workers and local officials that has taken hold in California and is gaining increasing national support and recognition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and others.

“I realized we need to bring the voices of the community there ... to really articulate what was really happening, what workers were experiencing on the health side,” said Liou, development director of Asian Health Services, a clinic and outreach program in Oakland’s Chinatown where staffers first took note more than a decade ago of how many nail-salon workers were dealing with cancer, headaches, miscarriages and other health problems.

Since then, the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative that Liou cofounded has spearheaded a California effort to reduce the toxicants that salon workers touch and breathe.

Cities and counties taking part in the program certify salon owners who voluntarily ban suspect ingredients and nail products and who provide proper ventilation, gloves and masks for workers.

Last year, California lawmakers passed legislation supporting the certification program.

PHOTOS BY ERIC RISBERG/AP Lan-Anh Truong performs a manicure at her Leann’s Nails salon in Alameda, Calif. Starting in 2010, salon workers in the San Francisco Bay Area waged a grass-roots campaign that has succeeded in establishing a certified system of healthy nail salons in...

Lemons are used to soften cuticles during a manicure at Leann’s Nails in Alameda, Calif.