Nail bar blues
For many young Vietnamese, the long, arduous trek to a 'dream job' in a European or North American beauty salon is a taste of the life that awaits them, writes Simon Parry
The Vietnamese teenager's face is a picture of earnest concentration as he crouches beneath a desk lamp and delicately applies acrylic varnish to the fingernails of a middle-aged woman in a high-street nail salon in the British Midlands.
The 18-year-old's English is rudimentary - he giggles and grunts shyly beneath his face mask - but the shop's female manager compensates for his lack of conversation by chatting happily away about her relatives in northern Vietnam as her understudy completes a French manicure. Twentyfive minutes after his customer has walked in off the street, his handiwork is complete. The woman leaves the salon admiring gleaming nails, which, at the equivalent of HK$250, set her back the price of a modest lunch.
In towns and cities across Europe and North America, nail salons are a luxury that more and more women are indulging in. They have exploded in popularity because they are cheap and they replicate the nail art sported by celebrities such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga.
In Britain, where, like in many other Western countries, high-street rents have plunged in recent years as financially crippled stores close down, nail salons have grown in number - by almost 20 per cent in the past four years. Across Europe, the sale of nail polish has grown at nearly double the rate of the overall make-up market in recent years. In both Europe and North America, the faces on the other side of the salon table are almost all those of young Vietnamese migrants, many of them freshly arrived from Asia. In California, where the trend for Vietnamese-run nail salons began nearly 40 years ago, an estimated 80 per cent of nail technicians are Vietnamese.
But behind the veneer of a booming industry in accessible glamour there is increasing concern among human rights groups. While most of the high-street businesses are legitimate, many of the young men and women working in nail salons are the victims of a form of human trafficking. Many come from poverty-stricken rural areas and are smuggled overseas after being put in the hands of trafficking gangs by their own families to give them the chance of a new life abroad, a Post Magazine investigation in the migrants' home country has found.
The youngsters end up as bonded labour after their families, in farming villages in Vietnam's northeast, remortgage homes and farm land and borrow heavily from relatives and friends to pay traffickers the US$20,000 a head it costs to take their sons and daughters to Europe to work in nail bars. The youngsters endure treacherous, months-long journeys through China and Russia, passed from one gang to another before entering Europe. Many then go on to Britain - the biggest European market for nail salons - hidden in cross-channel trucks or flown in from third countries within Europe using forged documents.