Tippi Hedren, the actress best known for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), played an important and unexpected role in the creation of the Vietnamese-American nail salon industry in the United States.
In 1975, after the fall of Saigon, thousands of Vietnamese refugees fled to the United States. Many were temporarily housed in refugee camps, including Hope Village, a camp in Sacramento, California.
Tippi Hedren, who by then had become involved in humanitarian work, was visiting the camp as part of her volunteer efforts with Food for the Hungry, a relief organization. She noticed that many of the women there were struggling to find a new start in America — they wanted to work, but lacked training and language skills.
Hedren remembered that the women admired her well-manicured nails and were fascinated by them. She had an idea: perhaps they could learn manicuring as a career.
Hedren flew in her personal manicurist, Dusty Coots Butera, to the camp on weekends to teach a group of about 20 Vietnamese women the art of manicuring and nail care. After their training, she helped the women obtain their manicurist licenses and find jobs in salons across Southern California.
“I was so proud” said Hedren, who starred in several Alfred Hitchcock movies in the 1960s. “Every one of them passed the cosmetic license test in English, then off they went.”
These first 20 women went on to teach their skills to other Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, creating a self-sustaining network of professionals. This established nail care as an accessible and successful entrepreneurial path for the community.
“I like to call her the godmother of the Vietnamese nail industry, because that’s what she is,” said Tam Nguyen, president of Advance Beauty College in Garden Grove. “For her to leverage her Hollywood star power to give back to the Vietnamese, what a great heart.”
In the 1970s, a manicure was a luxury service, often costing around $50. Vietnamese-owned salons revolutionized the industry by offering high-quality services at much more affordable prices (around $20 for a basic service today), making nail care accessible to the mass market.
Today, about 40–50% of all nail technicians in the United States are Vietnamese-American, and the majority are women. Many trace their professional roots directly or indirectly to that first group trained by Tippi Hedren in 1975.
Hedren later said it was one of the proudest achievements of her life. She received honors from the Vietnamese-American community for her compassion and vision — an extraordinary example of how one small act of kindness reshaped an entire industry.
“It was one of the most incredibly meaningful periods of my life,” she said.
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