NEWTON, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — With hospitals calling upon anyone and everyone to donate personal protective equipment, or PPE, to help them protect themselves while battling coronavirus, there's an unlikely place those supplies could come from: the beauty industry.
One Boston beauty salon owner wants others in her industry to step up and donate that equipment if they have any.
Julie Michaud founded Prettyology, a beauty lab in Boston. She said many people in her line of work, like nail techs and those who do lash extensions, use the same kinds of PPE that hospitals need.
"We wear masks, we wear gloves when we're tattooing," she said. "We work really closely to our clients."
After reading about the spread of coronavirus in China earlier this year, one manager suggested the beauty clinic stock up on PPE supplies, knowing they might eventually run short. As a result, Prettyology had even more PPE than usual.
"We always have a good supply of personal protective equipment, and in the end of January, we decided to really stock up," Michaud said. "Our goal was to have a two-month supply, never thinking that we would be closing—we wanted to be able to make sure we had the supplies we needed to be able to carry on with business as normal."
But last week, Michaud said, Prettyology decided to close as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Massachusetts. Michaud said that, with no clients coming in, her employees were put on furlough, and the equipment wasn't being used. She said her partner Steve suggested they donate the supply of masks and gloves to the hospitals that were in desperate need of them.
Michaud saw a nurse at Newton-Wellesley Hospital calling for supplies online, and brought the supplies she had gathered there.
"When the nurse came out to get the supplies, she had tears in her eyes, and she was visibly shaken," she said. "I realized in that moment just how intense and serious and critical the situation is, and quite honestly, after she took the supplies from me, I sat in my car for a moment and cried."
She posted about the donation on Facebook, calling on others in the industry to donate their supplies, too.
"I just dropped off a bunch of masks and gloves at the hospital since we won’t be tattooing eyebrows at Prettyology any time soon," she wrote. "If you have any masks you can donate, please, please do so ASAP. There will be more available by the time we go back to work."
That post has been shared and liked hundreds of thousands of times.
"I posted first on my personal page, and then shared to a lot of professional pages, and thankfully, a lot of people responded that they also had supplies that they were going to donate as well," she said.
Michaud said hospitals and medical workers need masks more than them right now, so it's important to make sure they're stocked.
"We have an obligation to protect our sisters and brothers in the front line," Michaud wrote. "They are the heroes trying to save humanity right now."
WBZ NewsRadio's Ben Parker (@radiobenparker) reports
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