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Founded to Change What Nail Care Could Be

The Story Behind Brooklyn's Cleanest Nail Bar

Lili and Cata was founded on a question that most nail salon owners were avoiding: why are we still using toxic chemicals when better options exist?

Co-founder Lilly Rojas had spent years inside that industry — first as a nail artist— watching it optimize for speed and volume at the expense of everyone in the room. She saw technicians breathing in fumes shift after shift. She saw guests soaking their feet in tubs that were, by design, breeding grounds for bacteria. A Christine Valmy graduate and New York State Licensed Nail Specialist, Lilly knew the fix wasn't radical. It just required someone willing to build it.

So she did — alongside her husband, Jorge Rojas, a licensed architect and lifelong New Yorker. Together they designed a spa built exclusively on non-toxic, vegan, cruelty-free formulas, engineered a tub-free pedicure protocol to eliminate bacterial transfer, and installed hospital-grade autoclave sterilization more commonly found in medical settings than nail salons.

They could have stopped there. They didn't.

Having worked the other side of the nail table herself, Lilly understood that the industry's clean-air problem had a companion: a fair-wage problem. Technicians were routinely paid below minimum wage for work that demanded precision, patience, and hours on their feet. She set out to build a luxury spa where the people doing the work were treated with the same care as the people receiving it — safe to breathe, fairly compensated, genuinely valued.

And because she never accepted that a nail appointment had to be rushed, Lilly reimagined the pace of the experience itself — turning each visit into unhurried self-care, complete with an espresso bar and a wine list, so a nail appointment becomes what it should have been all along: a reason to slow down, sip something you love, and permission to let yourself be looked after.

Today, Lili and Cata operates in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and continues to set the standard for what a clean, innovative, non-toxic nail salon looks like.

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Your Next Manicure Inspo Starts Here

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Two hands stacked with colorful painted nails against a mural background at Transmitter Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
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A woman wearing a black leather jacket with silver zippers, showing her red painted nails and a silver ring on her ring finger, holding the jacket closed.
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