No, we don’t want your robot manicures

2025 was supposed to be the year we swapped boyfriends for bionic lovers. Instead, in the latest instalment of intimacy as a UX problem we need to solve, we have the arrival of the world’s first robot manicure – a sci-fi upgrade to the service worker who has been holding your hand and doing your nails for years.

Created by 10Beauty (whose investors include Victoria Beckham and Karlie Kloss), the device promises a “full-service” manicure in 25-45 minutes. Development started in 2019, and the company now plans to roll out across the US in ULTA stores, into Nordstrom, gyms, airports and hotels. 10Beauty’s system uses single-use, recyclable manicure pods, pre-loaded capsules of cuticle serum, sponges and brushes, that function like a Nespresso machine for your hands. The robot runs through a five-step routine: removing old polish, filing nails, grooming cuticles with a softening solution and buffing brush, before polishing with colour and top coat. The whole thing costs between $25 and $35, significantly cheaper than paying (and tipping) a human.

The future they’re selling is frictionless: no awkward small talk, no waiting for your tech to finish with the client before you, no need to tip, no human touch. Beauty becomes another interface you move through, another site of optimisation, another task efficiently ticked off your ‘maintenance’ list. They say “full service”, but crucially, the machine won’t trim your cuticles (not that I imagine you’d want it to). Even 10Beauty understands there are limits to what we will comfortably allow a robot to do to our bodies. At first, nail technicians will be stationed next to the machines, there to “educate” customers, calm their nerves and help them customise their experience. Instead of doing the manicure, nail techs become the training wheels for the machine that’s eventually meant to replace them.

Women have created spaces similar to salons for centuries across the globe, whether sitting on the floor with their head cradled in the lap of an auntie or surrendering their hands to be adorned by another. Up until now, the salon has been one of the few sites left largely unchanged by the digital. I always saw that as proof that we still need the unbroken physical touch of strangers, the ritual and the care of others. For a few moments, we can surrender ourselves to another being, to knowing hands, to community chatter, to ancient rituals carried out by our ancestors over centuries. Nail artist Karma Eliades (Nails by Karma) knows this instinctively. “I think people crave connection, I’m literally holding their hand for one to two hours,” she tells me. “People bare their souls to their nail techs and build relationships that last years. It’s so much more than just painting a nail.”

I worked in salons during the earliest years of my career, and I saw firsthand how these spaces become sites of culture, self-expression and self-indulgence. I came to think of salons as spiritual places – places for tangible connection, a microcosm of culture, of femininity, of beauty, of womanhood, an instant and inherent sorority. “I like to think of my job as having two main parts: the actual process of doing nails and the client interaction,” says nail artist IMANICURED. “The communication between client and service provider is so important, it really is a safe space… a form of informal therapy with the emotional labour that comes with the job.”

At the nail salons I worked at, we’d have women coming in to get ready for major life events, we’d have girls run in off the streets looking for a sanctuary mid-panic attack, and we’d have teens asking to sit and charge their phones so they could get home safely. In the busyness of day-to-day life, salons are static, an unchanging in-between space and a constant cornerstone of womanhood. Some clients had been with their beauty professional longer than any romantic partner; others speak of salons as grounding in new cities, places they sought out for connection to culture, to community, to a sense of belonging.

Robot manicures, then, don’t just threaten a small corner of the industry. They threaten an entire ecosystem of care work that has, for generations, been one of the only accessible routes to financial independence for women and marginalised people. The beauty services workforce is around 70 per cent female, many of whom use the vocational skills society has taught them to forge flexible careers – working from home, in salons or in rented studios around their family life and children’s schedules. 

Arabelle Sicardi, who writes of being fed empanadas at their local nail salon when they were subsisting on a $25 weekly grocery budget in their book The House of Beauty, is clear about what’s at stake here: “It makes me quite sad actually; I believe it promotes the idea that beauty workers’ jobs are disposable and their time and craft is easily replaced,” they say. “The magic of a manicure isn’t just in the art done on your nails but the opportunity to connect to another human being, who might be very different from you, who is there holding your hand, not just for that appointment, but often for many years of your life, actually.”

Sicardi argues that to frame that social, emotional labour as a clunky inefficiency that needs to be solved by hardware is cold and inhumane. “When we displace human workers for technology, we’re prioritising convenience and speed over community and capacity building with people who are as vulnerable or more vulnerable than we are.”

Most high street nail salons are serviced by marginalised and immigrant communities; beauty work is frequently a survival strategy, a way of circulating money and care through networks that the state has abandoned. In Dollis Dolls, a community salon in north London run by charity Art Against Knives, vulnerable young women can get beauty treatments for free while accessing creative activities and social care. Each of the workers is trained to support their needs. A woman might drop in for a manicure before a job interview; another might come to seek support about domestic violence. The manicure is just the vehicle – the real service is safety, solidarity, a door that’s open when everything else is shut.

Against that backdrop, the fantasy of automation feels more like a dystopia. Tech companies like to sell us the idea that automating services will solve exploitation: no underpaid workers, no toxic environments. “Of course, these fantasies are just that – fantasies,” Sicardi says.

Eliades isn’t panicking, though. “I don’t think it will affect the industry any more than people wearing press-ons or people DIYing their nails at home,” she says. “Different strokes for different folks.” She admits the manicure machine could be useful “for people who don’t enjoy sitting and talking for hours with their tech, or maybe have sensory issues”. Nail technician and educator Natalie Beeley is similarly unfazed. “I’m absolutely unbothered by these things – I adore the thought of progression, but there are some things that they can never take away. We see clients through dating, breakups, engagements, loss – the things we share can never be matched by a robot,” she says. 

Both salons and the digital world can be places of connection, places of self-expression, where you can be anything you want to be - both engender transformation; makeovers with eternal possibilities. Robot manicures ask us to adapt again: to a future where human touch is optional; where the woman who used to hold your hand and do your nails is reimagined as obsolete, expensive, and slow.