Published on
updated on
Reading 3 min.
They have flourished all over the country, becoming as numerous as bakeries: “nail art” or nail care salons constitute a market worth several hundred million euros, arousing interest and concern among the heavyweights in the nail care sector. beauty.
Bright white tiles, neon lights and lacquered tables: in the former garage of her pavilion converted into a small beauty salon, Jessica Perrin says she receives up to eight clients per day to varnish and decorate their nails, or apply them. artificial ones, several centimeters long, made from acrygel.
Established since 2016 in Soussans (Gironde), a town of 1,700 inhabitants in the Médoc, a rural area 50 minutes northwest of Bordeaux, this nail technician explains having invested less than 5,000 euros to get started. And live “comfortably” from your activity, without paying commercial rent.
“But since Covid, it’s more complicated, it has opened everywhere“, notes the young entrepreneur, “without a diploma” but having completed certifying “private training”.
In small surrounding towns with fewer than 9,000 inhabitants, the AFP has in fact counted eleven beauty centers dedicated to nails, which is more than bakeries open in this poor wine-growing area.
“Lark Mirror”
According to the local branch of Adie, the Association for the Right to Economic Initiative, specializing in micro-credit for business creation, the projects around the nail presented in this territory by young women not graduates are at the top of funding requests, with food trucks and small multi-service gardening companies among men.
Nationwide, more than 15,000 “beauty care” businesses were created last year, boosted by the “nail art” craze, a record in the retail sector according to the INSEE.
For the president of the National Confederation of Aesthetics and Perfumery Régine Ferrere, under its El Dorado veneer, the nail market embodies above all a “lark mirror”, with “more self-employed people dying than successes“, especially “in small towns and rural areas“.
The fact remains that “the demand is enormous”, underlines the boss of the beauty professionals’ unions. She explains it by the decline of lip makeup, “replaced” by “eye makeup” and by the care of the hands, which have become “a point of attractiveness” for the eyes, particularly when the fingers are “constantly on the phone”.
Arriving in France in the mid-2010s, “nail art” was popularized by social networks, then anchored by Covid and its periods of confinement, masked and conducive to “do it yourself” internet tutorials, say professionals from the middle.
According to marketing teacher-researcher Johanna Volpert, customers in the beauty sector first seek “geographical proximity, human relationships and talent” and for that “word of mouth takes precedence”, “not necessarily the diploma”.
“Do it yourself marketing”
Boosted by “ultra visual +do it yourself+ marketing, posted on TikTok or Instagram”, these independents from GenZ (generation born in the early 2000s), “with a very strong entrepreneurial spirit“, which open small centers or offer dedicated treatments at home or in hair salons, now represent 90% of this thriving market.
But a controversy over hygiene, poorly done care or a non-compliant product can quickly establish “a prejudice that is always difficult to erase,” warns this professor at Kedge Business School, the management school in Bordeaux.
To protect themselves, the heavyweights in the sector are calling on the State to recognize the sector as “a real profession”, with “real regulations”, calls on Angélique Gascoin, CEO of L’Onglerie.
This historic manufacturer and distributor of cosmetic products, with around a hundred franchised stores, has just opened the first French CFA (apprentice training center) dedicated solely to the nail profession in Canéjan, on the outskirts of Bordeaux.
According to the manager’s estimates, nail and hand beauty care should soon exceed 40% of the national aesthetics market, estimated at two billion euros.