It took Trinity Do five minutes to decide to buy the salon she has now run for 20 years. Her friends thought she was being impulsive, but as Trinity’s Touch gears up for its big anniversary, her confidence then seems justified.
Do believed in her business from the start because “location is everything,” and she anticipated the salon’s spot on highly-trafficked Massachusetts Ave between Linnean and Lancaster would draw in customers.
Do had emigrated from Vietnam when she was 16 and when she bought the store she was 30 and working in accounting at Mellon Bank. When she got together with friends, she would offer to do their hair or makeup. Her friends began to hire her for weddings. “And I realized, hmm, this is potential business,” she said.
While still working at the bank, she enrolled in a six-month night course to get an esthetician’s license. During this time, she also met Tu Do and got engaged. As she was finishing her training, Do heard about the nail salon being for sale through a friend of her future sister-in-law. Do bought the salon two months before she got married.
Do enlisted her husband to manage the employees so that she could focus on what she loved to do: eyebrows. “It’s changing people’s look and confidence,” Do said. “I am able to create art on people.”
“It’s also proof for me that art can make money,” she said.
Several years into owning the salon, Do’s sister developed a thyroid issue that caused her eyebrows to thin, and Do wanted to find a solution. She began learning about semi-permanent makeup, a cosmetic tattooing process that, through a technique called microblading, can help recreate the look of eyebrow hairs.
Do participated in a program which taught her to tattoo fake eyebrows, eyeliner and nipples. On the last day of her training, she tattooed a breast cancer survivor who had lost her nipples during treatment. When the patient saw Do’s finished work, she told Do through tears: “‘you make me feel complete.’”
Do said she takes time to get to know her clients, forming personal relationships with them. “Each [person who comes into] my life is like a book that I read,” Do said.
“She’s a sort of philosopher and she’s become a friend,” said Anne Cushman, a client of Do’s since the start.
When Susan Schlossberg, also a patron of Trinity’s Touch since its opening, first met Do 20 years ago, she was impressed: “I’m thinking, this girl has a lot of guts to do everything she’s doing.”
Schlossberg, a survivor of breast cancer, had her eyebrows and eyeliner tattooed by Do during her treatment. When she started to lose hair on her head, Do helped her cut it off. “And that made a big difference to me, that she cared enough to say, ‘okay, we’re gonna have to fix this,’” Schlossberg said.
“The things that she does for cancer patients are amazing,” Schlossberg added.
For their first 14 years, the Dos ran a successful business and had two sons. The salon was originally two storefronts side-by-side, one for nails and one for makeup and eyebrows.
In 2020, Do and her husband sold the nail side, so that her husband could spend more time with their children, who were by then in high school. In 2024, they bought the UPS store one building over from the salon, where Tu Do now works. The salon was a family affair. Do employed three of her sisters at the nail salon and Trinity Do’s older brother, Simon Nguyen, lent her money to buy the salon 20 years ago, and again two years ago to buy the UPS building. Nguyen had faith in his sister: “I trust her because she [is] very smart and very skillful and I think she can be successful.”
“He’s a very, very wonderful brother,” she said. “It’s hard to find a brother like him.”
Do also credits her mother with teaching her business skills when she was young. “We all learned from my mom,” Nguyen said, explaining that their mother had run a business in communist Vietnam, despite minimal education.
Do continues to develop her skills. She’s currently taking a content creation class and working to improve her English.
“I love what I do. I enjoy every day,” Do said. “This is my happy place.”
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