Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Did Tippi Hedron start the Vietnamese manicure industry?

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Strange but true, actor Tippi Hedron kickstsarted the Vietnamese manicure industry in the United States in the 1970s. This is that story. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. On Raiders of the Lost podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Jaws Shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of Obsession.

On set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together. Deep dives into classics like 2001 of Space Odyssey or Fight Club. Plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost podcast and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.

We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together. breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Man, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it.

Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the Arch. IHeartRadio 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. RR. That's right. Thanks to the following Inside Fullerton website, National Museum of American History, K-C-R-A.com, OSU. Dot edu. And a website called Viet Salon, and if you're like, that's a funny sounding name, it's not because we're talking about the interesting fact that Vietnamese American and Vietnamese women generally populate the manicure nail professional system like no other group in the United States. Yeah, and it's one of those things that you just know that in the United States, 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, and this is in California, but this is also true in a lot of the country, but they have the number at 82 percent 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, and 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, $8 billion global industry in just a few decades.

Yeah, it was, you know, before the 1970s, if you got a manicure or a pedicure, you were probably some wealthy woman who, you know, was doing it as like a luxury service. It wasn't, you know, 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 there are, for have done for you. Yeah, but even still, we haven't gotten to the, um, the reason why so many Vietnamese, uh, people taken over the nail industry and turned it into what it is. Um, for one thing, though, like, the reason that it became, um, like, primed for that to happen is that, um, these nail texts realize, 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 Tippy Hedron, who was the Star Broar, 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.

And during the visit, she noticed that these women were kind of gaga over her men. 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. And she reached up over her head and went, ding, ding on the light bulb with her nail, and she said, I got a great idea, everybody. So she, being a star, got her nails done quite a bit. She went to a place called the nail patch.

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 nail patch in Encino, California, which is the setting for the movie Encino Man.

And Tippy Hadron said, Hey, Dusty, do you want to come teach these women in Hope Village how to do some nail stuff? because they're crazy about my manicures. So you want to just have a lark and come, come show them what to do? And Dusty's like, yeah. Yeah, she's like, I'm Dusty Boots Butera.

The answer is always yes. So Dusty Boots went up there. First training session went really well. And so Tippyhedrin 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 ends out to 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 French he dropped out from in Greece. Oh, yeah? No, I just made that. I just had. to give a French a shout out, and that was the only way I could come up with it. I got you. And the owner, Becky Hamilton, was like, hey, let's figure out how to create a nail manicure curriculum, essentially, so we can take anybody who wants to learn, especially women from Hope Village, and train them how to do this so they can go create a life for themselves.

That's right. I feel like we should take our little break here. Sure. And we'll come back and get to, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore.

Check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together. I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moor. My Man, Wolf for raids, I'll believe in anything, and tattoos all the things she said, and how they all became a part of this global phenomenon. Stream encore on IHeart Radio, crave, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's Sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became. the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars,

the moments to take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi.

You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested. in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so we're back.

When we left, Tippy Hedron had gotten Dusty Boots, Petera on the scene, training these women, and then partnered with Becky Hamilton of Citrus Heights Beauty College to get a real nail curriculum going. The one thing I don't think we mentioned, which is kind of cool. If you do a little research on this, you'll see a lot of amazing. amazing photos of all of this happening in real time. And that's because Dusty Boots, Boutera's husband, Massimo, Massimo, yeah. Massimo Boutera was a photographer and went up there to this refugee camp and took lots of, like, awesome pictures of this all taking place. So, yeah, it was pretty well documented. So I think the first group of 20 women from Camp Hope underwent 350 hours of training. So when they graduated, they knew everything there is to know about manicures, pedicures, all the cures.

And they went out and basically spread this knowledge and started training other women, essentially just enough to hire them. And then, like, those women gained on-the-job training. You could also go to beauty colleges now to learn it as well. And this seed was planted of this massive transition in the nail salon industry. Again, like, this is really where the idea of nail salons kind of came from. Yes, there was the nail patch, but the ubiquity of them today, they are everywhere. Sometimes if the strip mall is big enough, they'll have multiple nail salons in there.

And like they're just everywhere. All of this came from this late 70s transition. Yeah, for sure. And just like any ethnic group that moves to another country and kind of maybe from the outside, weirdly, becomes dominant over a particular part of, you know, business, that's how it happens, you know. Word goes back to Vietnam, like, hey, you know, your aunt or your sister or somebody has gone over to the United States. They're making a great living, doing nails. So then they come over and they get taught. And then it just sort of the tendrils sort of spread out from there. And it became Vietnamese

dominated. And one of the reasons, I think Becky Hamilton reference was, hey, it wasn't just us in the curriculum and us teaching them. But she was like, they had amazing. working ethics, and that's why they were successful. Yeah. Do you ever get a pedicure or a manicure? Nah, not my thing. Man, you should treat yourself, at least treat yourself to a pedicure once, and I'll bet you'd do it more than once.

You told me to do that ten times now, and I just don't think it's my thing. All right, I'm taking you. Sorry. I'll kidnap you if I have to and take you, and you're going to be like, Josh, thanks for this. No, I wouldn't because I don't like people touching my toes. It freaks me out. you would actually be delivering a kind of a horror experience for me. All right, let me think about this then.

So, Chuck, this is not all just necessarily like hip, hip, hooray for nail salons. There's definitely some downsides to it. If you really kind of want to make it in America, in nail salons, you essentially have to own your own. And most of the people who work at nail salons do not have any kind of ownership stake in them. Yeah. Actually, sadly, they typically make less even than minimum wage. So a lot of nail salon workers are being paid an illegally low amount of money. Yeah, which is, you know, even in California, they have a $13 an hour minimum wage.

This is from 2021. And I think that same year, the average for a nail salon worker was $10.94. So, you know, how do they get away with that? That's what I want to know. I looked, basically, someone has to report you. And from what I understand, a lot of nail salon workers barely speak English in some cases or just don't at all. So there's no way for them to report. And then secondly, they might not know where to start with reporting.

And then also thirdly, this is their job. And they depend on this job as little as they're paid. So they're probably not going to start causing trouble or rocking the boat or whatever. And then even worse, traditionally or typically, when you are reported for this, basically nothing happens to you as a business owner. All right. So the TLDR is there being taken advantage of? Yeah, it happens. And certainly it's not all nail salons, but it is something that is pretty rampant in that industry.

And then at all nail salons, there's a real health risk. with respiratory difficulties from all of the chemicals that are used in there and just are in the air. It's just part of the air in the nail salon. Yeah. So tip them big, everybody. Yes. Although they are often forced to split their tips with the ownership, which is pretty crummy. Well, that's why you get to tip them even bigger.

Yeah. What you do, I've learned this from experience, you show up with a 20 jam between your big toe and your second toe. and when they take your shoe off, you just wink at them. They get it. They understand. Okay. That's all for you. So you got anything else?

I got nothing else. Short stuff's out, everybody. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.