Carpe Feetum

New York appears to be ready to join at least 14 other states in banning fish pedicures. State Senate bill 6205 introduced by Jeff Klein says:

USE  OF LIVE FISH IN PEDICURE PROCEDURES PROHIBITED. 1.  NO OWNER OR OPERATOR OF AN APPEARANCE ENHANCEMENT BUSINESS SHALL KNOWINGLY:

A. PERFORM A PEDICURE PROCEDURE THAT INVOLVES THE USE OF LIVE FISH  IN ANY MANNER, OR

B.  DIRECT AN AGENT OR EMPLOYEE OF SUCH BUSINESS TO PERFORM A PEDICURE PROCEDURE THAT INVOLVES THE USE OF LIVE FISH IN ANY MANNER.

All bills are written in all-caps, but I thought I'd leave it that way to wake you up this morning.

The bill does make me wonder 1) if there are Appearance Dehancement businesses and 2) is it possible to unknowingly perform a fish pedicure?

The saga of the fish pedicure has been going on in the United States for about a year now. Originating in Turkey and popular in Asia, the procedure involves sticking your feet into a tub filled with small, toothless carp that eat away the dead skin. It's not exactly using leeches (which is FDA approved, BTW), but several states are up in arms about it.

The first known use of fish for pedicures in the US was by John Ho of Alexandria, Virgina. After a vacation to China where he and his wife experienced not just a pedicure but a full-body carp exfoliation (picture below), he invested $40,000 for ten thousand fish. The novel procedure was an instant hit, but state regulators quickly shut him down because for his 15 minute procedure the clients would put their feet into a communal tub - this ran afoul of the Farifax County Health Department who decided the communal foot tub was a swimming pool. Ho sidestepped the swimming pool problem by switching over to individual tubs for each client, and, because Virginia's Board of Cosmetology only has jurisdiction over facial skin, Ho was free to perform the fish exfoliations unhindered.

Ho has franchised his operation, but is having difficulty in several states, including here in Washington state, where the state banned the procedure and shut down the procedure at Peridot Nails in Kent. Although not banned in Nevada (is anything banned in Nevada?), the procedure is also not approved, which makes it risky for a salon owner to make the mult-thousand dollar investment because they may later be shut down; last spring Assemblyman Tick Segerblom (D-Las Vegas), introduced a bill that would explicitly approve the procedure, but it doesn't appear to have gotten out of committee.

The general issue is one of cleanliness. Cosmetology regulations generally say that any tool used in a procedure must be sterilized afterwards. The fish are considered tools, but sterilizing a fish makes that fish pretty useless for anything but a snack. Rather ironically, Ho was searching for an alternative to pedicure razors (which have also been banned many places for sanitary reasons) when he ran across the fish pedicure idea.

In Ohio, however, the procedure has been approved after review. Marilyn Huheey, an opthamologist and member of the state Board of Cosmetology tried out the procedure herself and afterwards recommended approval to the board. As she put it:

It seemed to me it was very sanitary, not sterile of course. Sanitation is what we've got to live with in this world, not sterility.

Sources:
New York State Assembly
Seattle Times (photo)
The Medical News
Luxist
USA Today
Wall Street Journal
book of joe (photo)
Las Vegas Sun
Times Union