dangers of the smells in the salon — but

it’s not the smells that should cause us

concern. Learn the facts on air puri?cation,

and then take steps to protect yourself and

your clients.

“If you smelled a gas leak in your house, you wouldn’t want an air purifier to get rid of the smell, you would want to get rid of the gas,” says Doug Schoon, chief scientific advisor for CND. In the same way, techs can go crazy trying to get the smell of nail products out of the air, but that’s not the right way of looking at the problem. You need to ventilate the vapors and the dust, and in doing so, you’ll take care of the smell. Even though the dangers of the salon are well under OSHA’s guidelines, “there is still a need for proper ventilation,” says Schoon.

But what is proper ventilation? Neutralized, purified, oxidized — we hear lots of words used to describe what needs to be done to “clean” the salon’s odiferous air. At the same time, we hear about the dangers of breathing dust for 10 hours a day. Don’t listen to fear-mongers. “It’s easy to work in a salon safely,” says Schoon. Think of protecting yourself and your clients as a three-tier approach. Working from the broadest area in, techs should be concerned first about the building, next about their salon space, and finally about their breathing zone.

YOUR BUILDING A building’s ventilation system, whether in a strip mall or a stand-alone structure, is called the HVAC system. It stands for Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning. This is your first line of attack. The HVAC system brings fresh air to the salon and pushes it from one room to another. This system needs to be professionally maintained by a specialist. The specialist will change the filters, and properly balance and clean the system every year. An HVAC system removes mold, mildew, dust, etc., providing relatively fresh air to a building.

YOUR SALON “If you walk into your salon in the morning and it smells, you have a problem,” says Schoon. The vapors emitted by nail products should be out of the air within 10 minutes, so there should be no smell of nail products in your salon when you arrive in the morning. This probably shocks a number of us, because for years, we’ve smelled acrylic the minute we open the doors. You have probably even thought if this was bad for me, they would regulate a system to take the smell away. Somehow there’s a part of us that thinks someone else is going to take care of us. “The reality is, we need to be progressive about our own health,” says Jeff Cardarella, president of Modern Solutions in Madison, Wis. “We might think we’re protected by regulations, but the regulations are outdated and meaningless.” His first recommendation: tear up the carpet. “Carpeting in a salon is not a good idea.” says Cardarella. “It’s an odor and a dust trap, and it doesn’t belong in a salon.”

Next, invest in an air purification system. Techs may have heard that the best ventilation systems vent to the outside. Schoon agrees — get the vapors and dust out of the salon. However, venting to the outside may not be possible. Even if it’s possible, it may not be practical. Ventilating to the outside could blow all your warm or cold air outside, says Cardarella. But if we don’t vent to the outside, how do we clean the air in the salon?

You need a professional system that can handle what you’re putting into the air. Don’t buy one designed for the home or office, advises Schoon. An appropriate ventilation system will contain a material that absorbs the vapors created by nail products. This is important. Some products claim to neutralize the smell, and since the smell is gone, we think we’ve taken care of the problem. “This doesn’t get rid of the chemicals in the air,” says Schoon. The system won’t simply neutralize the smell; it will remove the vapors from the air. Generally speaking, a whole-salon air purification system circulates salon air through the unit and material inside the system acts as a sponge, absorbing chemical vapors. The absorbant filters in these types of salon systems will need to be changed regularly, every three to four months, as they get saturated with salon chemicals. Each unit on the market will have different specs, so techs should ask questions about how effective the unit will be for a salon of their size with their number of techs (or stylists, etc.). Multiple units may be needed in larger salons. Units are mobile and should be positioned in the center of the salon, never in a corner. “Purifying the salon air is important,” says Cardarella, “but we also want to prevent the vapors from even getting into the air.”

YOUR BREATHING ZONE The easiest and most efficient way to prevent vapors and dust from getting into the salon is to supply each nail desk with a source-capture system. A source- capture system protects the “breathing zone” of the tech — the two-foot radius in front of the mouth. “Every breath we take comes from the breathing zone,” says Schoon. “We want to keep that area clean.” And if that area is clean — if the vapors and dust are captured immediately — then they don’t make it past the desk and into the salon. If anything does get past the source- capture system, it would be absorbed by the whole-salon unit.

A number of source-capture systems are available on the market, but they all do essentially the same thing: They immediately capture (suck) the dust and vapors that are created when techs prep, apply, and file enhancements, and then they absorb and contain the vapors, dust, and debris. As with the larger, whole-salon ventilator, the absorbent material needs to be changed regularly as it becomes saturated with salon chemicals.

While source-capture systems are all meant to accomplish the same thing, the quality of them dramatically differs. “These are not magic boxes,” says Schoon. He recommends techs choose a unit with a four-inch bed of absorbent material that the air has to pass through. “It needs to be a hefty, thick bed,” says Schoon. “Tables with a bed of material that you can see through are useless.”

Together, “source-capture and purification systems minimize what becomes part of the air,” says Cardarella. Techs will benefit in two ways. First, they will breathe clean air — which makes for happier lungs and reduces headaches, fatigue, and dry, irritated eyes. Second, they will never have to be concerned about the smell of the salon.

Friday, November 16, 2007

During the 13 years that Connie Nguyen has worked in Bay Area nail salons, she’s seen numerous friends and co-workers become ill. She, too, has come down with mysterious skin rashes and respiratory problems. A few years ago, experiencing shortness of breath, she went to the doctor.

“The X-ray technician asked me if I’d been smoking a long time,” said Nguyen, 48. “It shocked me. I have never smoked in my life.”

Amid a booming beauty industry, California’s legions of nail salon workers – most of them Asian immigrant women – are being exposed to hazardous chemicals in cosmetic products, chemicals that have largely gone unregulated because state law exempts cosmetics and personal care products.

With evidence mounting that prolonged exposure to chemicals is putting these vulnerable workers at risk for a host of health problems, state Sen. Carole Migden held a legislative hearing Thursday in San Francisco to begin assessing perils in salons. Her purpose was to establish what the state can do to protect salon workers.

“Every day, nail salon workers are exposed to a wide array of carcinogenic chemicals,” said Migden, a San Francisco Democrat who heads the Senate’s Labor and Industrial Relations Committee. She noted that some of the products routinely used in the state’s thousands of nail and beauty salons are banned in Europe.

Nail salons garnered headlines in recent years after scores of customers around the state became ill from bacterial infections, many stemming from dirty footbaths after pedicures. A law, authored by then-Assemblyman Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), now a state senator, went into effect last year tightening controls and imposing penalties on salons found to be using unsanitary practices.

But even though the number of nail salons in California has more than tripled during the last two decades, little research has been done on the health effects to the state’s salon workers, many of them in childbearing years, from exposure to toxic chemicals.

Various experts testified during the packed 21/2-hour hearing at City Hall that salon technicians – many of whom work 10 hours a day, six or seven days a week – were systematically accumulating significant amounts of toxic chemicals.

“It’s not just the dose that makes the poison,” said Charlotte Brody, a registered nurse and executive director of Commonweal, a nonprofit health and environmental research institute in Bolinas.

“We are now beginning to see chronic asthma, dermatitis and other respiratory illnesses,” said Julia Liou, representing Asian Health Services, a community health center serving Alameda County, and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. Liou said that a research project is to be started in January by Asian Health Services and the Northern California Cancer Center to study whether salon workers have a higher incidence of breast cancer.

Lam Thi Le, 58, a mother of two who lives in Oakland, testified that in 1992, two years after she began working as a manicurist, she was diagnosed with thyroid problems; a decade later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She quit, Le said, “after 12 years of sacrificing my health to make a living.”

George Alexeef, deputy director of the state’s Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which publishes a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity, testified that toluene and formaldehyde – contained in some nail salon products – are among the hundreds of substances identified by his office. He said the two chemicals cause health effects ranging from fatigue and headaches to respiratory irritations and cancer.

“We have more chemicals than we can possibly test or evaluate,” said Alexeef, whose office is part of the state Environmental Protection Agency.

Kristy Underwood, executive officer of the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, which regulates the salon industry, said there are only 16 inspectors responsible for overseeing the state’s 35,000 salons. The state has some 94,000 licensed manicurists.

“It is physically impossible to reach all the salons,” she said.

Also testifying was Nhung Pham, 55, who works at Nail Today in Oakland. She is part of an informal group of salon workers brought together by Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice.

“We share stories about our aches and pains, and some have even shared stories about miscarriages,” she said.

Many of the workers speak little or no English, impeding “our ability to understand the health and safety inspections and citations process,” Pham said.

Migden said she plans to introduce legislation on the matter in the coming year.

E-mail Elizabeth Fernandez at efernandez@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page B – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Globe Staff / November 19, 2007

Back when she began sanding fingernails and lacquering toenails for a living – back when she was younger – Tammy Ly didn’t worry so much about the throbbing headaches, teary eyes, and cramping hands.

“Years passed and I had more headaches, my vision became worse, my hands hurt,” said Ly, who has spent 14 years waxing, polishing, and buffing customers, most recently as proprietor of Tammy’s Nails in Codman Square, where spindly plants from her native Vietnam fill the windowsill, put there to cleanse the air.

“My workers have headaches and sore eyes, too. If someone could help us, that would be good,” she said.

In Boston and across the United States, emigres from developing nations occupy jobs – and, often, own businesses – that expose them to toxins and tasks linked to wheezing lungs, foggy brains, and sore limbs. Three years ago, Boston health authorities embarked on a novel campaign to protect the health of workers in auto-repair garages, a field frequently occupied by immigrant men.

Now, the Boston Public Health Commission is expanding its Safe Shops initiative to the hundreds of nail salons that dot the city, businesses overwhelmingly staffed by women from Southeast Asia. They are shops where the tart perfume of nail polish and other chemical-laden beauty products hangs heavy in the air.

Starting in January, health agency representatives will venture into salons, stressing the importance of proper ventilation, demonstrating the correct use of gloves and masks, and urging owners to switch to safer products that have emerged in the past year.

The campaign, underwritten by a $300,000 federal grant, is an official acknowledgement of what has long been known by small business owners and their workers: Service industry employment is often the modern-day version of what Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair once described: jobs with long hours, cramped conditions, and only nominal government oversight.

“These women are being exposed all day long to solvents and similar chemicals in the products they’re using that can have a variety of effects. It’s a smorgasbord of chemicals,” said Paul Shoemaker, an environmental health specialist who will run the city’s nail salon campaign.

A study of Boston area nail salon workers, released last month on the website of the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, found that 31 of 71 workers reported respiratory symptoms, including troubled breathing, persistent coughing, and sinus woes. Those symptoms occur at higher rates than in the general population.

Especially telling: More than two-thirds of the nail technicians with respiratory trouble said they felt better after leaving the shop, according to the study, led by Cora R. Roelofs, an occupational health researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Similarly, 31 workers reported that they suffered headaches that improve only after their shift ends. Earlier studies found that salon workers have an elevated risk of respiratory, skin, and neurological ailments.

“They talk a lot about the headaches,” said Hiep Chu, executive director of Viet-AID, a community alliance that collaborated on the study. “Some of the individuals have constant headaches. Some of them want to commit suicide, it’s so bad.”

Companies that make nail polishes and glues argue that their products are safe when used correctly, in salons that have appropriate ventilation and storage. But activists counter that what workers face is a toxic mix of long workdays, poor on-the-job conditions, and a stew of chemicals adding up to danger.

“These folks work in the salon 10 to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week,” said Lynn Rose, a social justice activist in Western Massachusetts who works as a consultant to the US Environmental Protection Agency on issues regarding nail salons. “Unless you have a good ventilation system or a good way to manage the products to eliminate the emissions, you’re creating an ongoing exposure throughout the day to a whole range of chemicals.”

A top cosmetics industry executive, Eric Schwartz, said that chemicals such as toluene and dibutyl phthalate – once ubiquitous in nail polishes – are safe in small amounts. Still, his company, OPI, recently removed those agents from its products.

“We’re not saying our industry is perfect,” said Schwartz, cochairman of the health and safety committee of the Nail Manufacturers Council, a trade group. But “a lot of the problems come back to good work practices and ventilation. The real issues in our industry are allergies and respiratory irritation, people not wearing masks when they’re filing, and not wearing protective clothing or being sloppy with the ingredients they’re using, because they spill stuff on their skin.”

Nail shops operate with scant regulatory oversight, and many federal standards about acceptable levels of chemical exposure were established more than three decades ago. While state inspectors visit salons roughly once every two years, they focus chiefly on whether shops are clean and licenses are posted.

As Boston’s health department presses to improve working conditions in nail salons, officials realize they must contend with a swirl of economic and cultural forces.

Nail shops are a powerful economic engine in the Vietnamese community; national studies estimate that four of every 10 nail technicians are Vietnamese. And owners already feel besieged by price wars ignited by a proliferation of shops.

“You can’t just come in and shut them down or scare away their customers, because this is their livelihood,” said Roelofs, who is working as an adviser to the city.

At Tammy’s Nails, as dusk fell one recent afternoon, Susie Stewart-Branch sat with her hands dangling on a table. Mai Vo, a technician, took a whirring, handheld sander to the customer’s nails, a cloud of filings rising.

Stewart-Branch came to have her eyebrows waxed and her fingernails and toenails coated in a subtle pink called Cotton Candy. Total cost: $60.

Funny you should ask about the safety of salon workers, Stewart-Branch said, “because I was just thinking about it. They’ve been here all day. We just come in for a few minutes, maybe half an hour. So we’re not that affected.”

What she likes, Stewart-Branch said, is that the owner of the shop tries to keep a door open for fresh air. And workers plop cotton balls and other cosmetic-laden waste into plastic jugs, to prevent chemical odors from lingering.

Ly smiles broadly as customers gaze approvingly at their fingers and toes. Her own nails, cut short, bear no trace of polish.

“I take care of my customers’ nails,” Ly said, her voice tired. “No time for mine.”

Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.

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

A Report by Women’s Voices for the Earth

Health Hazards Associated withToxic Exposure in Nail SalonsA look at the health hazards associated with toxicexposure in nail salons and recommendations forimproving conditions for nail salon employees andcustomers. By Alexandra Gorman and Philip O’ConnorWomen’s Voices for the EarthFebruary 2007 Acknowledgments:The authors are grateful to the many peoplewho contributed either directly or indirectly tothis Report, including Bryony Schwan, ExecutiveDirector, The Biomimicry Institute; Dori Gilels,Executive Director, Women’s Voices for the Earth;Felicia Eaves, Women’s Voices for the Earth;Julia Liou, Planning and Development Manager,Asian Health Services; Stacy Malkan, Health CareWithout Harm; and Elizabeth Katz, CIH, CaliforniaDepartment of Health Services OccupationalHealth Branch. We especially thank Cora Roelofs,ScD, Work Environment Department, Universityof Massachusetts, Lowell, for her helpfulsuggestions, edits and overall content review. Wealso appreciate the thoughtful and insightful ideas,contributions and comments of the members ofthe Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the CaliforniaHealthy Nail Salon Collaborative. We are gratefulto the Mitchell Kapor Foundation for theirfinancial support of this project. Finally, we wouldlike to acknowledge the generous contributionsof Cedar Tree Foundation, Thanksgiving Fundand Tides Foundation Reproductive Justice Fundfor their general support of WVE’s programs andorganizational development.

By Alexandra Gorman and Philip O’Connor: Women’s Voices for the Earth, February 2007

By Alexandra Gorman and Philip O’Connor: Women’s Voices for the Earth, February 2007

By Alexandra Gorman and Philip O’Connor: Women’s Voices for the Earth, February 2007

By Alexandra Gorman and Philip O’Connor: Women’s Voices for the Earth, February 2007