Danger at Your Local Salon

Just 36 hours after getting a pedicure at an upscale nail salon near her home in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, Jamie Joffe, 38, had a fever of 101 degrees and a very scary-looking toe—“It was about five times its usual size, and there was greenish goo oozing out from under the nail,” she recalls. Joffe went to the emergency room, where they diagnosed her with a staph infection, probably from scissors or a cuticle pusher contaminated with the bacteria. “The doctor made an incision and drained all this stuff out of it,” she says. “If I hadn’t gotten the infection treated quickly, it could have spread to the rest of my body.”

After taking antibiotics for 10 days, Joffe was fine, but the experience left her with more than a scarred toe. “I still get pedicures, but I now bring my own tools and watch what they’re doing very carefully,” she says. “I had no idea you could get so sick from a pedicure.”

Most of us aren’t aware of the potentially ugly side of manicures, pedicures, Botox injections, haircuts, or waxing. “We assume that if a salon is operating it must be safe, but that’s not true,” says Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, M.D., a clinical assistant professor of dermatology at Baylor College of Medicine, who has studied salon infections and salon safety. “There’s lots to worry about, including poorly trained technicians and dirty or illegal instruments.”

Each state has its own rules for salon safety, but even those with the strictest standards, like California and Texas, can’t scrutinize the businesses as carefully as they’d like. “Each of our 18 inspectors is responsible for 3,500 to 4,000 shops, which means most salons get inspected only about once every six years—unless we get a complaint,” says James Jacobs, a supervising inspector with the California Bureau of Barbering and Cosmetology. “About 75 percent of the salons we inspect have violations. Sometimes they’re minor, like a nail file being re-used when it should have been tossed. But lots of times they’re real health hazards, like filthy foot spas.”

That’s bad news because, like hospitals, salons can harbor dangerous infection-causing bacteria and viruses, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and hepatitis B. That means it really is buyer beware, and the onus is on you to protect yourself. Here’s how to make sure all your beauty treatments are totally safe.

At the nail salon

Trouble spot: Foot spa

There’s nothing more relaxing than soaking your feet in a tub of warm, bubbling water—or is there? In 2000, 110 women who had pedicures at the same northern California salon were infected with a nasty bacteria, Mycobacterium fortuitum; some of the women had dozens of boils and were on antibiotics for months. Afterward, scientists from the California Department of Health Services took swabs from 30 whirlpool foot spas in 18 nail salons around the state and found potentially dangerous bacteria in all but one.

Since then, California has required nail salons to follow specific cleaning and disinfection procedures for their foot spas, but not all states have the same requirements—and not all salons follow the rules. In fact, 27 California salons were put on probation for foot-spa violations in the first six months of 2008 alone, says Kevin Flanagan, spokesman for the California Bureau of Barbering and Cosmetology.

Other foot-spa worries: warts and fungal infections. “Both spread on wet skin,” says Carolyn Jacob, M.D., director of Chicago Cosmetic Surgery and Dermatology.

Protect yourself

Wash your hands and feet with antibacterial soap before any procedure, and ask your technician to wash her hands.

Ask to see the foot-spa-cleaning log, Flanagan says. Salons with the highest standards drain all the water, scrub the residue from the walls, and run a cycle of disinfectant for 10 minutes between every client—a procedure that’s particularly important for older machines with pipes that can harbor standing water, a haven for bacteria. Many salons are switching to pipeless foot spas, which don’t have a place for water and bacteria to build up; they still should be disinfected between clients and at the end of the day, and filtration screens should be periodically removed and cleaned.

Don’t shave your legs the day of your pedicure because even a small cut can offer an entry point for minuscule bacteria and other infection-causing bugs. “See a doctor if you have a suspicious spot that won’t go away or gets worse after a pedicure,” says Oliver Zong, a New York City podiatrist. If your aesthetician has a cut on her hands, reschedule your appointment, ask for a different technician, or ask her to wear gloves—a practice some salons employ automatically.