As a half Asian woman, I rarely getting my nails done because the visual of the predominately female Asian staff working at my feet has always made me uncomfortable. Nail salon owner, Amy Ling Lin, knows what I mean. In the early days of her ten-year career working in nail salons, she witnessed a client threaten to slap a technician when she couldn’t find her requested nail color because she didn’t speak English. The incident stuck with her and planted the seed for what would later become Sundays Studio, a non-toxic nail salon that will have five locations across Manhattan by the end of the year.
“The salon business has changed a lot over the past 30 years,” Lin tells me at the NoMad Sundays Studio, a warm Nordic-inspired space filled with smooth woods and inviting peach leather chairs. “It used to be a quick service but salons are changing to meet people’s needs.” While Ling says getting your nails done used to be all about social status—with acrylic and extensions being the most sought-after services—it’s now about self-care.
When Lin was creating Sundays Studio, she saw the 4000 nail salons in New York City as a missed opportunity. With nail services requiring clients to carve time out of their schedule for themselves and manicures being one of the few instances when a person is forced to be off their phone, Lin realized the typical nail salon—with its bright lights and loud music—was being under-utilized as a site of self-care. So she decided to offer guests the opportunity to meditate during their treatment by providing headphones with binaural beats. “When you’re getting a manicure done, you’re sitting straight for 30 minutes, it’s a perfect fit,” says Lin.
“How do we define beauty?” asks Lin. It’s a question she seems to constantly be asking herself when considering what self-care services to provide at Sundays Studio. Growing up in China, where Lin says the beauty standard is very singular and specific, and thereby exclusionary, she wanted to create a space where people could find beauty within. “The confidence comes from inside, not outside,” Lin says. “When you visit a hair or nail salon, they give you a magazine, but when you look inside you start to compare yourself, thinking, ‘I don’t look like that.’” It’s why she asks staff to be the hand models for their product photoshoots and offers services that cultivate confidence from within. One such service is the option for clients to write a letter to themselves, which Sundays will send them a year later in the mail.
This desire for clients to bring their newfound mindfulness home with them is also why she hands out affirmation cards when they leave. “People come here every week or two weeks, we have high retention rates, but I don’t want their self-care to stop when they leave.” Clients can also stream the binaural beats used for their meditation at home. Lin continues to expand Sundays’ at-home offerings, namely through new products, the latest of which is their hand cream. With most people mindlessly slathering on hand cream, Lin sees this too as a missed opportunity for self-care. “I teach people how to self-massage with it,” she says. “Every little thing I create is intended to get us to slow down.”
Sundays Studio isn’t the only one using nail treatments as an opportunity for slowing down and turning inward. Several hotel spas have started integrating meditation into their services. At Kohler Waters Spa—which has four locations, including their flagship in Kohler, Wisconsin (the only five-star spa in the state)—guests can have a ‘Sound of Color Manicure or Pedicure’ in which world-renowned meditation gurus provide healing voices and visualizations to accompany their nail treatment. Earlier this year, the Mandarin Oriental launched their ‘Wellness Music Programme’ which offers guests the choice of five different therapeutic playlists. Inspired by Five Phases Music Therapy—a Traditional Chinese Medicine theory used to treat a wide range of physical and mental ailments—each of the five playlists are associated with different organs and designed to address different needs.
At Sundays Studio, a more conscious approach to nail treatments also means prioritizing non-toxic products. After graduating from Columbia University with a MBA, Ling spent a year working with a chemist to create Sundays’ non-toxic nail polishes, what would become the signature product of their vegan nail salon, the first of its kind in New York City. In addition to the non-toxic polishes—intentionally labelled by number instead of name, to prevent staff from facing criticism if they don’t speak English—she created a line of chemical- and cruelty-free lotions and cuticle oils. Throughout all her products, there is an emphasis on transparency of ingredients, something Lin says is missing in the nail industry. “A lot of nail polishes have TPHP, which can affect your hormone system and many salons use cuticle eliminator which is essentially an acid,” Ling warns. “The people who work in these salons are getting exposed too, which is a big part of my motivation—I do it for the clients but also for the staff.”
This is the other way in which Lin is reinventing the wheel—she is attempting to reduce the transactional nature of nail treatments and instead encourage a more conscious engagement with staff. First off, all staff wear name tags and are introduced by name to clients. Nail specialists are seated at the same level as clients to eliminate the visual hierarchy of staff being below the client. “You don’t feel a hierarchy with your hair stylist,” Lin points out. “I want to make the nail salon more like the hair salon, so we’re doing a lot of things to intentionally make the relationship between staff and clients closer.”
Relationship-building is something Lin sees as key, not only for improving mindfulness, but also for creating a sense of community. Prior to the pandemic, Sundays Studio hosted cooking classes, group meditation sessions and even speed dating events with Bumble. She plans to bring these events back but is currently busy putting the finishing touches on two new locations in Manhattan. Lin is mindful to not pile too much on her plate, to ensure she lives out the principles she promotes. “Building this business, I constantly remind myself self-care is important,” Lin says. “People assume me working in wellness, that I’m super healthy. But I’m just a normal person. My philosophy is to be gentle with yourself.”
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