A Portland, Oregon, nail salon customer has filed a $1.75 million lawsuit after allegedly contracting genital herpes while getting her nails done with unsanitary tools in June of 2023.
The lawsuit was filed at the Multnomah County Circuit Court last week, and it describes how a 23-year-old woman known by the initials S.R. acquired a disease while in a salon called PDX Nails. S.R. came to the establishment to get an acrylic nail manicure but claimed that the nail technician didn’t wear gloves and used drill bits that were stored in an Altoids tin.
Following receiving the manicure, S.R. noticed that two of her fingers were inflamed and swollen; she also began to feel physically ill. In the following days, she developed large blisters around her nails, and it finally spurred her to go to Kaiser Permanente, an urgent care clinic.
After doctors tested the discharge from the blisters, they concluded that it was herpetic whitlow, more commonly known as herpes. S.R. expressed having persistent flare-ups of symptoms despite being prescribed antiviral medication.
The lawsuit lists Tam Nguyen and Hai Nguyen, the manager and owner of PDX Nails, respectively.
Shockingly, Tam and Hai Nguyen own another nail location in Portland, and it has been fined in the past by Oregon’s Health Licensing Office and Board of Cosmetology back in 2021 for “failing to disinfect used tools [that] come in direct contact (with) a client.”
The fine detail that the second location left “used drilling bits on the workstation” and also failed to clean pedicure stations and foot spa equipment properly.
S.R. told Oregon Live that she never thought she could get herpes from something like unsanitary electronic nail files.
“People have asked, ‘What happened to your finger?” she recalled. “I don’t want to tell them what it is because it’s really embarrassing.”
