Heel and Toe and Ecstasy: Giving Pedicures to the Epicures

In Southern California, the land of nearly year-round sandal weather, pedicures long ago advanced from basic corner nail salon services to spa treatments featuring reclining chairs and peppermint massage oils.

Now pedicures have ascended to the realm of luxury and a few of their practitioners to the level of celebrity.

“I’m known in my field because I make corns disappear just by massaging,” Bastien Gonzalez said Saturday as he sat among the shiny tools of his trade in a cozy leopard print alcove of the Tracey Ross clothing boutique in Sunset Plaza.

“I tried to put the gold on the name of ‘pedicure.’ When you think of it, it is considered a cheap thing. I try to re-breed it at a high level.”

No one better exemplifies the guru-fication of the pedicurist than Gonzalez, an attractive, charming 33-year-old Frenchman who tends to the feet and toenails of clients across the globe.

Tracey Ross, style maven and a bit of a celebrity herself in Los Angeles, snagged Gonzalez for a day of bookings. He turns out to be as much a jet-setter as many of his devotees. Gonzalez divides his week between London and Paris. When he’s in New York every six weeks, he charges $250. But for Ross’ customers and friends, he charged $225.

If that’s shocking, keep in mind that Gonzalez caters to the crowd that pays twice that for shoes -- on sale. In fact, many of Gonzalez’s clients fly him on private jets to their homes.

“You think when people fly me in private jets, they care what the pedicure costs?” But he doesn’t exactly charge them. He allows them to give him whatever they think he’s worth. And he won’t divulge who flies him to Abu Dhabi or New York or allow to be named the stratospherically famous actress he politely had to turn away when he was simply too booked to fit her in. (“I won’t break appointments for anyone,” he says.)

“The only way you are accepted in this business is to be extremely secrete,” he says in a luscious French accent, pronouncing ‘secret’ as if it were the word for the thing glands do. “I’m in the service industry. I’m lucky enough to be on the high end of it, but I am here to serve.”

Ross started getting pedicures from Gonzalez a little over a year ago on her trips to Europe. She says that, as a result, her nails, bruised from regular hiking, have been healing. “I don’t know if he cast a spell over my feet or what,” Ross gushed in a phone conversation last week. Those who showed up for pedicures on Saturday were mostly her friends and were primed to drink in the magic of Gonzalez.

“I’m so excited,” Nanci Ryder, partner in the public relations firm Baker/Winokur/Ryder, said as she took her seat before Gonzalez. She had postponed her vacation to the desert.

“You should have heard me explaining to people, ‘I have to go a day later because I have to stay for a pedicure,’ ” she said.

Gonzalez practices what he calls the pedicure medicale, a medical pedicure that is relatively common in France, he said. However, his special twist is that he blends the clinical aspects of the medical with the pampering aspects of the traditional American pedicure. In the process he wields tools culled from dentistry, podiatry and the beauty salon. He also believes massaging feet and toes can eventually eliminate corns and calluses.

There are two basics of the routine pedicure that he eschews: He never soaks the foot in water (he prefers to work on a dry foot) and he never applies nail polish.

“Painting them is actually damaging,” he explained before his first client arrived, casting a glance at a reporter’s coral colored toes. “I’m sure your bright red nails, they are not in good shape,” he said, his tone more medi- concerned than pedi- snobby.

But you don’t need the garnish of the polish after Gonzalez applies his own grainy cream -- “it has marble dust” -- to smooth out ridges in the nail, which he then buffs.

“Oh, my God,” said his first client of the day, Linda Caan, as she peered at her toenails, which looked as glossy as if he had put clear polish on them.

Gonzalez doesn’t do a little courtesy foot massage, either. He jiggles the feet, gently pulling at the toes, then he stands, leaning in like a masseur, working his way up the lower legs to the knee.

“We can’t dissociate the feet from the legs. You can’t move the puppet without the strings,” he said as he worked his way up Ryder’s legs. Ryder closed her eyes and enjoyed it.

Gonzalez, once a ski champ, had planned on a career in medicine, “but I can’t bear blood,” he said. After a couple of skiing injuries and months in rehab, he got interested in designing better-fitting ski boots. He went to pedicure school “hoping to understand the mechanics of feet.”

When he couldn’t get started in the ski boot business, he opened a pedicure salon. He said he went through three years of formal training and now there is a movement afoot in France to increase it to four years of training to elevate the status of pedicurists to that of podiatrists.

“But that’s completely forgetting the wish of woman,” he said in his disarmingly jumbled English. “They do not want to be cut.”

He sees feet callused and battered by high heels. “Women say, ‘Oh, they’re comfortable.’ No, they’re not. But I like high heels,” he added quickly. “My girlfriend wears high heels.”

His French girlfriend, Laurence Calabuig, wandered around the Tracey Ross shop trying on pale floaty dresses. She is 39, thin as a reed in white jeans and stunning without a trace of makeup.

Yes, he pedicures her feet, but he hasn’t done them in a while. “I let him rest,” Calabuig said.

Gonzalez, who takes about an hour per pedicure, finished with Ryder. She said -- in a declaration too lusty to put in the paper -- that she could care less about the price. “It felt so good. It’s a pure, pure luxury thing. The money doesn’t matter.”

Jewelry designer Loree Rodkin was next.

After Gonzalez was done, she said, “I’ll never be able to get a normal pedicure again.”