Aerovex Formerly Modern Solutions

Salons – An industry untouched by air quality regulation employs mostly women of child-bearing age

Friday, May 16, 2008

ANNE SAKER The Oregonian

The Oregonian

A nail salon makes its first impression on the nose. Even regular customers can feel overpowered by the smell of the chemicals necessary for that professional finish.

On a typical visit, a customer might spend two hours exposed to that smell while getting a manicure or pedicure. Yet day after day, thousands of Oregon women, a large number of them immigrants from Vietnam, must tolerate air quality that could make them sick.

“I don’t even smell it anymore,” says Yen Pham, who for 14 years has been cutting hair and doing nails at her own salon, Beyond Beauty, at East Burnside Street and Northeast 82nd Avenue in Portland. “Customers come in, they say, ‘Oh, so strong!’ I’m so used to it, I don’t notice it.”

But a small group of Oregon government workers and nonprofit advocates did. Since last summer, they have been trying to figure out what to do about nail salon air quality and hazardous waste — and how to protect workers.

“No one really has the teeth to regulate this industry,” says Patricia Huback, an air quality analyst with the Department of Environmental Quality. “It’s a giant loophole.”

Huback got interested in the subject while visiting family last summer in Atlanta. Her sister wanted to get her nails done but didn’t want to take her 4-year-old son into the salon because the smell made him cough.

“I started thinking about that,” Huback says. “Who does regulate this? If I don’t want my own nephew to go in there, what about the workers?”

When she returned to Oregon, she organized a meeting that led to the formation of the Oregon Collaborative for Healthy Nail Salons. It was modeled on similar groups in Washington, California, Massachusetts and Texas aimed at improving nail salon air quality from different approaches.

Nail products contain chemicals such as toluene, formalin (a form of formaldehyde), acetone and phthalates. The Food and Drug Administration does not test or approve beauty products, so it falls on manufacturers to tell customers and workers about the chemicals in their products. They are not required to do so, although California passed a law last year directing manufacturers to list all ingredients.

The scope of the air quality problem isn’t well-defined, but the outlines are ominous: The findings of about half a dozen epidemiological studies suggest that long-term exposure can cause ailments from dizziness to headaches to asthma.

More troubling, the studies indicated that long-term exposure poses the greatest risk to workers of child-bearing age — the industry’s predominant work force. Because the chemicals can be absorbed through the skin as well as the lungs, pregnant women also may be exposing their fetuses.

Manufacturers contend that, if handled correctly, the chemicals are not dangerous. Studies of California salons conducted in the late 1990s found exposure levels well below federal thresholds.

Doug Schoon, a chemist who works for the industry, believes that groups like the Oregon collaborative draw conclusions by relying too much on what they smell in salons.

“At a nail salon, you may go in and smell something stinky, but the odor is far more than the exposure,” Schoon says. “Anything that smells bad people think is dangerous. And that’s just not the case.”

But Huback, other collaborative members and industry watchers say government exposure limits are outdated and don’t adequately account for nail salons, which are often small and usually located in rental spaces where upgrades to ventilation systems cannot easily be made.

“The laws on the books and the regulations and the standards are fairly meaningless,” says Jeff Cardarella, whose Madison, Wis., company, Modern Solutions Inc., sells an air-filtering machine just for nail salons. “The enforcement is nonexistent. You have this growth of this industry and these dangerous pollutants, particles and gas exposing women of child-bearing years.”

At the end of April, Oregon had 4,594 licensed facilities that offered nail services, and 14,744 licensed nail technicians, nearly 1 percent of the state’s total nonfarm employment.

Ninety percent of nail-salon workers are women between 18 and 35. The state does not ask licensees to list nationality, but the industry publication Nails magazine estimates that nationally, Vietnamese immigrants represent about 43 percent of all nail technicians. In California, they represent 80 percent.

The members of the Oregon nail salon collaborative realized they needed to include at least one worker in their efforts, and they recruited Yen Pham.

With a dazzling smile, perfect French manicure and long, wavy hair, Pham, 39, stands as an advertisement for her work. The Vietnam native and U.S. citizen is the mother of three and owns Beyond Beauty with her husband. They have two employees.

She says that for Vietnamese women, the nail business is “an easy way for us to go to school, learn a skill, go to work right away. Vietnamese women want to have their own businesses. This is a way to do that.”

What drew the collaborative to Pham, though, was her own effort to address salon air quality.

Five years ago, she installed a ceiling vent to draw away fumes, although she says she’s not sure it’s big enough for her space. The nail tables have built-in fans to fight dust, but the fans exhaust the air back into the salon.

The collaborative has come up with a half-dozen ways to deal with salon air quality and developed a pamphlet to guide workers on the safe handling of chemicals. The information is available on the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division’s Web site — but the state doesn’t have the software yet to translate the pamphlet into Vietnamese.

The state agency that licenses salons and OSHA are offering salon owners advice about ventilation and such protective equipment as masks and gloves. Multnomah County is studying the possibility of assigning someone to do further salon assessments, and nonprofit groups such as the Zero Waste Alliance are looking into grants to pay for other ways to reach salon workers, such as a teaching film.

The nail business made $6.16 billion in 2007, according to Nails magazine, down from $6.84 billion in 2004. Pham says she’s noticing the drop-off as people trim what they spend in her salon for nice nails.

“That’s OK,” she says, “I like cutting hair better anyway.”

Anne Saker: 503-294-7656; annesaker@news.oregonian.com