August 25, 2020 — As the pandemic drags on and unemployment dries up, small businesses are going under. One sector that’s started to get organized, through a combination of social media and encouragement from county supervisors, is the local beauty industry. Last week, about a dozen beauticians and their supporters wrote letters to the board of supervisors, arguing that they can operate safely and should be allowed to open their doors. At that point, the county had only been on the state covid watchlist for a day, and some of the letters had been written when salons were shuttered by order of the local public health officer — not the state.
The reason Mendocino County was only placed on the state watchlist last Monday is that state data lagged significantly behind the local numbers. On July 25, public health officer Dr. Noemi Doohan announced, prematurely, it turned out, that the county was already on the watchlist, and issued orders to match the state’s restrictions, in hopes of being able to maintain local control.
Supervisor John Haschak said it “remains to be seen,” if the strategy has paid off, since nobody knows how long counties remain on the watchlist, once they get onto it.
On Friday, Haschack and Supervisor Ted Williams sent off a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Mike McGuire, Representative Jim Wood, and two state associations, making several of the arguments the beauticians had made in their letters. They pointed out that of the 579 cases that the county had as of August 21, none had been traced to salon activity. They asked the governor to bolster region-specific solutions, and restrictions backed by transparent local data.
It’s too late for Erin Deahl, the owner of Skin Day Spa in Ukiah. She would have celebrated her seventh year as a business owner on August 20th. Instead, She’s closing up shop. “I’m the first to fold, but I’m not gonna be the last,” she predicted. Deahl has a place to land when the pandemic is over, at the salon where she worked before striking out on her own. She’s planning to sell off her own equipment at a garage sale, or on Facebook, or to her three now-former employees. She saw it coming, as peers in other states and counties started to fold. “And I slowly realized that I’m in deeper than they are, financially,” she explained. About a week after the second closure, she accepted the fact that she would have to close. “I mourned it, I accepted it, it was like, I went through the phases of loss,” she recalled.
Chelcy Gibbs Ford is the owner of Lash Lounge, also in Ukiah. When I called her, she was heading to Costco to get supplies for a possible power outage. She doesn’t have a backup career plan. “I’ve been in this industry for fifteen years,” she said. “This is my life. When we first closed the first time, we were told three weeks, and it ended up being three months.” She did get unemployment, but recently learned that it was being cut to under $90 a week.
Gibbs says she went through 1600 hours of education and passed a tough state test on sanitation. In July, Newsom issued an order allowing limited outdoor operations for salons. But Gibbs says she can’t do lashes and waxing outside in the summer heat. And the loss of work is proving to be too much for some. She said there was a rogue decision by some in the industry to open on August 17, in defiance of the orders. “Some salons did, and some didn’t. I chose not to. I didn’t work as hard as I did, and do everything, and bust my butt, to lose everything.”
The supervisors’ letter asserts that overly strict state regulations make the industry harder to regulate locally, which is a familiar conundrum in cannabis country. “Most social problems have been amplified concurrent with restricted business activity continuing in an atmosphere of prohibition,” the letter states. Haschak noted that he had heard of “some barbershops having a closed front door and an open back door.”
Alycia Whitehead, who works for Gibbs at Lash Lounge, says her costs haven’t changed, even when she started losing clients who were too scared or too broke to pay for an expensive beauty treatment. When she was able to reopen, briefly, she put thousands of dollars’ worth of protective and sanitation equipment on her credit card, as well as products that had expired. She wore a face mask under a shield. Now the replacement products have spoiled, and she’s had to get another job to pay the rent on her home and her share of the salon rent. “Your costs don’t change,” she said. “All my products cost what they cost. My rent costs what it costs. My insurance is five hundred dollars a year, that’s coming up in two weeks. And there’s no relief.”
As for Deahl, she’s in the anger part of the loss cycle. “I’m angry. I’m just angry right now,” she said. “I am mad at people at the state, I am mad at the county, I am mad at a lady in Wal-Mart yesterday who refused to wear her mask. I am mad at people, I drive by their house and they’re having a party with fifty people. I’m mad at all that, because maybe, maybe if we had just quarantined correctly the first time, we wouldn’t have to be dealing with this as much.”