Short Stuff: Did Tippy Hedron start the Vietnamese manicure industry?

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Just listen, we don't care where you hear it. with Robert Smigel and friends on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck, Jerry's here too, and for days. And this is short stuff, one that ties into a recent episode of ours. Rawr!

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KCRA.com, or r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r-o-r- 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, 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.

Yeah, for sure. I do have a stat for you here, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is in California, but this is also true in a lot of the country. But they have the number at 82% of nail salons in California are staffed by Vietnamese people,

generally Vietnamese women, but some men are doing that thing too. And it goes all the way back to 1975 after the Vietnam War ended. Vietnamese immigration happened in a big way. And I think by the year 2000,

there were a million Vietnamese immigrants had settled in the United States. Yes, and not all billion obviously were working in 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 industry in just a few decades. Yeah, it was before the 1970s, if you got a manicure or a pedicure,

you were probably some wealthy woman who was doing it as like a luxury service. It wasn't 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 1974. And then acrylic nails came along in 1979 and they just sort of democratized the whole thing. It made a lot cheaper to do and therefore have done for you.

Yeah, but even still, we haven't gotten to the reason why so many Vietnamese people 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 texts realized like, You 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 salon, you could pretty much open and own your own. Like 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 a nest egg for themselves. Yeah, for sure.

So, you know, we mentioned the year was 1975, And the place was something called Hope Village, which was in Weimar, California. And it was the first non-military refugee camp in the United States. And in 1975, there were about 20 Vietnamese women that were there in Hope Village.

And at one point, actress Tippi Hedron, who was the star-broer, the star of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, came through. She was doing a lot of humanitarian work at the time and went to visit Hope Village. 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. She reached up overhead and went tink tink on the light bulb with her nail and

said, I got a great idea everybody. she, having being a star, got her nails done quite a bit. She went to a place called the Nail Patch. It sounds a little hippie to me, but apparently it was a high-end nail salon, 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-Butera founded the the Nail Patch in Encino, California, which is the setting for the movie Encino Man. And Tippi Hedrin said,

hey Dusty, do you wanna come teach these women in Hope Village how to do some nail stuff because they're crazy about my manicure. So you wanna just have a lark

and come show them what to do? And Dusty said, yeah. Yeah, she's like, I'm Dusty Boots Butera. The answer's always yes.

So Dusty Boots went up there, first training session went really well. And so Tippi Hedrens flew her up basically every weekend over a few months, you know, while she was still running

that nail patch in Encino and just kept teaching them like new techniques and like kind of all the ins and outs of the business. Yeah. So there were, I think originally 20 women

who became the first class that Dusty Boutera essentially graduated. And this was also just ready made to be adapted to actual like beauty schools, beauty colleges.

In particular, the first one was Citrus Heights Beauty College, which is well known for also being the one that Frenchie dropped out from in Greece. And, no, I just made that.

I just had to give a Frenchie shout out and that was the only way I could come up with it. I gotcha.