Victoria

I bought a voucher from Living Social for a mani/​pedi from here back in September. My friend and I both booked appointments for 1 pm. We showed up to the unmarked salon close to Victoria station. It was located on the third floor of a building which was a maze to find passing through hallways of random doors leading into people’s offices and finally finding the salon at the end of the hallway which was no more than just a room with a couple hair styling chairs. There was no one there to greet us, even the lady who was in the middle of a haircut didn’t acknowledge us there. Finally a woman came out of a back room and was ready for one of us. We explained how we booked them at the same time so we could be finished at the same time. She went to another room and brought in another lady to work on one of us. We were then taken to a back room that had two chairs and some towels laid out, no spa pedicure chairs or anything which we had expected. Instead they used plug in foot baths you can buy from anywhere that looked absolutely filthy. They then put plastic bags in these baths for sanitary reasons which I was grateful for, but still disappointed about. There is nothing relaxing or spa like about your feet sitting in luke warm water in a plastic bag. The actual pedicure consisted of some foot and nail filing, a bit of lotion and nail polish which my friend was not even offered. The manicure was also nothing special. No lotion or cuticle oil or anything was even applied to my hands. For a £15 special I figured we had just gotten what we paid for, and then I saw what the actual prices were for these services. A manicure runs at £20, and a pedicure £25 which I thought was outrageous for this so called «salon». I could do a better at home manicure and pedicure for free. To top things off, about a week and a half after I had gotten the pedicure done, my one toenail started to turn black. My mother who is a nurse looked at it and asked me if I had recently had a pedicure done, which I had. She said it was a foot fungus, probably due to dirty utensils used in a salon or unsanitary conditions. I wasn’t surprised by this, again thinking back to how dodgy the place looked and the filthy baths they were putting people’s feet in. I find it ironic that the spa offers laser toenail fungus removal as one of their services. I will be staying away from that. I should have walked out straight when I got there, but I am a big believer in not judging a book by its cover and giving this small business the benefit of the doubt. I now have to get my foot treated for this and needless to say my feet look worse off than they did when I walked into the salon. Never again will I go back here, even if they were giving away free manis and pedis. Dodgy and gross.