Having tiny fish nibble the dead skin off of your heels and toes in a new pedicure treatment sounds like a slightly modified James Bond water torture -- but would that be for the fish or your feet?
Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is, "ew, gross," but apparently, it's taking off at an early-adopter salon in northern Virginia, Yvonne Nails and Spa, that got a little creative when razors (i.e. "cheese slicers" -- arguably just as gross) became outlawed. The treatment was experienced by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America, Vanessa Williams on Ugly Betty, and HuffPo blogger Megan Shank, Newsweek's Chinese edition editor, who says that they're all the rage in Beijing and Shanghai, feel "really great," and for all the pedicure perfectionists who need to know, actually do the trick of softening, cleaning and exfoliating feet.
Of course, counting myself among folks who care for both our good foot looks as well as our eco footprint, I've gotta wonder about those Turkish doctor fish, or Garra rufa, who must dine on soggy epidermis bits in a pool of water that no doubt gets pretty saturated with lotions and toxic nail polish products. If phthalates, a hormone-disrupting chemical found in breast-cancer tumors and used to boost fragrances in beauty products, have been linked to the feminization of fish (not to mention baby boys) when massively diluted in our waterways, what must it be doing to those wee carps in a warm pedicure pool? PETA has already issued an action alert on their website: "Confining thousands of fish to a tiled pool in a beauty salon in 94F water is anything but harmony with nature! In fact, it's exceptionally cruel. These severely crowded fish have no environmental enrichment, and they're fed the calluses and corns of customers who care more about foot beauty than about animals' lives and welfare." Yvonne Spa employee Shannon Risco says that no fish have died, adding that "nothing lives forever," but that they do keep the water between 80F and 95F to keep them alive.
C'mon, they're just a bunch of fish, you may be thinking. (What about the toxicity and comfort level of salon workers, you may ask? Ah, that's the stuff of other posts.) But think of this little trend as a case toward a larger point: We are all becoming aware of the fact that beauty has its environmental cruelties, from facial scrubs made from plastic pellets that end up in the marine-life food chain, to body washes that contain petroleum derivatives that take 300 years to break down in our ecosystem, to shampoo surfactants that give suds their oomph and also soap up our bays and disrupt pH levels. Fortunately, forward-thinking beauty companies across the spectrum -- boutique brands, health food-store favorites, mass retailer companies and luxury names - are adopting green practices, from quietly leaving out carcinogenic parabens and other toxic chemicals in product reformulations, to loudly proclaiming their use of organic ingredients and recyclable packaging. Regardless of the noise level of the marketing and attempts to "greenwash" products into virtue, let's keep on keeping on: Fewer fish feet, more eco-friendly beauty treats. Then again, perhaps we should be grateful that there are certain areas in the beauty industry that aren't environmentally friendly, such as recycling body fat procured in liposuction, for the production of, say, soap.
And johnp, that's quite an imagination you have!