000-000-0000 · closed Mondays
8 procedures, described rather than claimed
This is the page most salons write in one sentence, and it is the page that should decide where you go. Every line below is a procedure, not an adjective.
An emery board and a buffer are porous. They cannot be sterilised, only rinsed, and rinsing a porous block is theatre. Every one of them goes in the bin at the end of your appointment, in front of you. It is the largest single consumable cost in the shop and it is not negotiable.
Nippers, pushers and scissors are scrubbed under running water, dried, then run through a steam sterilising cycle at the back of the shop. They come to the table dry and stay in a covered tray until they are used.
The basin is lined for each appointment and the liner is lifted out and binned with the water still in it. Underneath, the basin is scrubbed with detergent and wiped down between clients, and it is a plain basin — there is no jetted plumbing anywhere in this building, because there is nothing to clean in a pipe you cannot see.
Carbide and ceramic bits are brushed, ultrasonically cleaned and sterilised. A bit that has chipped is thrown away rather than kept for rough work.
Each table has its own arm drawing dust away from your face and ours, and it runs whenever a drill or a file is moving. It is the reason the room does not smell like a nail salon.
One towel per client, washed hot. Nothing gets a shake and a second appointment.
The table top, the lamp, the arm rest and the chair are wiped with a disinfectant between every appointment. This is why there is a fifteen-minute gap in the diary that you are not paying for.
If there is an infection, an open cut, or a nail that has separated from the bed, we stop and say so. That is /nails-we-cannot-work-on.html and it is a real page with real refusals on it.
Every trade in this portfolio has the same temptation: put a seal on the page and let it do the arguing. A photograph of a certificate tells you nothing about what happened to the file that is about to touch your hands. What tells you something is a shop that will describe its practice in enough detail that you could check it, and then let you watch.
Ask to see the file come out of the packet. Ask where the steel has been. Ask what happens to the liner. Nobody here will mind, and a shop that does mind has told you what you needed to know.
Because the inside of a pipe cannot be inspected and cannot really be cleaned, and the pedicure chairs that have one are the reason this trade has the reputation it has. These are plain basins with a liner in them. It costs more in liners and it is worth it.
Every table has an arm that draws dust away while a file or a drill is moving. It is there for the person sitting behind it as much as for you — six technicians breathing filing dust for nine hours a day is a bigger exposure than any one appointment — and it is the reason the room does not smell like a nail salon.
Files and buffers are single use. Files, buffers and wooden sticks are single use and binned in front of you. Steel is washed and steam sterilised, and every pedicure gets a fresh liner.
There are nails we will not work on. There are nails we will not work on, and there is a page that lists them. Being told no at the beginning of an appointment is better than being told nothing and finding out in a fortnight.
Six tables · three pedicure chairs · a published price for everything
Pick the service and any add-ons and the calendar adds up the minutes before it looks for a slot, so the times you are offered are times that actually fit what you asked for. A pedicure also needs one of the three chairs, and if none is free at four o'clock on a Saturday it will say so rather than book you in and hope.