When Ji Baek decided to open up a nail salon, her husband thought she was out of her mind, and her mother stopped talking to her. An educated and classically trained musician, Baek was supposed to do something refined with her life, not spend her days touching people's feet. "[But] I was more afraid of touching raw chicken," quips Baek.
Ten years later and Baek, 37, is sitting atop a mini empire that has changed customer's expectations of the neighborhood nail salon.
At Rescue Beauty Lounge in New York City, sanitation is key. Forget the image of dirty carpets with nail clippings and grimy Jacuzzis reserved for spa pedicures. Baek doesn't even have whirlpool pedicure baths installed in her spas. "Those are very unsanitary," she says, noting that the filters are meant to be changed after each use, but doubts it is done.
In Baek's world, individual sinks are used for footbaths and cleaned with Clorox bleach after each client. No nail file is reused; wooden sticks utilized for waxing are used once and disposed (no double-dipping into the wax); and instruments made of metal are sterilized after each use in an auto clave (which heats the instruments to 325 degrees, killing all germs), then sealed in a medical pack.
A self-professed germaphobe, Baek's hardline rules on cleanliness at Rescue Beauty were founded on her own experiences getting mani-pedis. Disgusted by the practices of local nail salons, she felt her approach would gain an edge on the market. When she opened in 1998, the city took notice and customers flocked to have their pampering done in private rooms and semi-enclosed individual nail stations ensconced in tranquil surroundings.
Baek immigrated to the United States when she was 12 years old, settling in Staten Island with her older sisters and brother. Beginning in high school, she spent most of her time in Manhattan, studying viola and piano at Juilliard Prep and Manhattan School of Music.
"My mother had two daughters who did art, and she decided she wanted one to do music," Baek explains. Her music career, however, came to an end when she developed painful tendonitis in her shoulder at 20.
"Up to that point," Baek says, "I didn't know anything else. I had been cocooned in the music world and focusing on that." She eventually got a job managing restaurants in Manhattan.
After working in the culinary industry for several years, Baek thought she would open her own restaurant. She attended the French Culinary Institute because, she says, "If the chef walked out, I wanted to be able to step in." At 26, Baek married her husband, Alex, a Russian American. He had his own music instrument business and they lived a comfortable life on the Upper West Side. She didn't need to work and spent her days concocting gourmet meals in their kitchen. Baek grew bored. Until the idea for Rescue Beauty was born.
As a restaurant manager, Baek had learned about cost analysis, inventory, hospitality and training. It was, she says, "like Business 101 and MBA boot camp." She took the restaurant model and applied it to the business plan she was devising for her beauty service business.
Undeterred by her mother's misgivings, Baek enrolled in a Korean nail school in Queens for a six-month training program in 1997. "It was taught by complete ajumas and ajeossis," Baek recalls. "They were born-again Christians and at lunchtime, they would come up to me and say 'I could save you.'"
Baek finished the program and got her New York state license. She found an investor - her husband - and opened the first Rescue Beauty Lounge in Soho. "I knew there was a correct way to do things," Baek says, recounting the strict health codes she had learned in the food industry.
Because of the salon's adherence to cleanliness and aesthetically pleasing surroundings, clients don't mind paying prices that sound steep compared to other salons (manicures currently range from $28 to $65 and pedicures from $48 to $120).
Elizabeth Negrobotto, a publicist for Pastis Restaurant, has been a regular since Rescue Beauty Lounge opened its newest location on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District in 2004. "I love getting manicures and pedicures there because it's quieter and has privacy, which is rare!" she says. "My favorite thing about it is not being jammed right next to someone I don't know who is speaking loudly in their mobile phone."
With only two locations (the original Soho location closed when they gave up the lease and reopened in Nolita), Rescue Beauty is reported to be the favorite nail spa among the city's luminaries in the advertising, fashion and beauty worlds, although Baek is loathe to divulge details. "I hate name-dropping," she says.
She will say that Rescue Beauty has become a place to hold business gatherings. "No one eats anymore in New York City, so rather than going to a restaurant for a meeting, they come here," Baek says, adding that something about baring your feet leads to more relaxed communication.
Vogue actually named Baek - known for a penchant for designer clothing - "Manhattan's chicest manicurist." She may also be the busiest. Baek works seven days a week and will soon be coming out with a do-it-yourself guide for nails. She has her own line of beauty products and nail polish (Dead Calm is a perfect pearly blue-purple according to Joanne Chiu of Shu Uemura) and also works backstage at fashion shows.
"It's an incredible business, and spiritually, it's an amazing opportunity to guide people," Baek says, referring to the nail technicians she hires and trains. "I feel so proud that I can help someone learn a skill that she can take and go anywhere in the world."
Finding work elsewhere shouldn't be too difficult for a trained manicurist as copycat nail businesses have cropped up around Manhattan. Baek views it as a compliment, rather than a threat. "We've had incredible input into the industry," she says. "I hope it continues."