A day in Hanoi with Kim: what the tooth gem part is actually like

I run Glint9, a small smile jewelry studio on the second floor of 12 Cat Linh, in Dong Da, Hanoi. Tooth gems, grillz, piercing. My husband tattoos in the same shop, so there is usually more going on in the room than what you came for.

This page is not a price list — I already wrote one of those for tooth gems in Hanoi. This is the honest version of what the visit looks like, including the parts I cannot promise.

The gem is the smallest part of the day

The jewelry is quick. That surprises people who have been building it up in their head for three days.

What takes the time is everything around it. Looking at stones in real light instead of on a screen. Changing your mind. Changing it back. Deciding where it goes, which matters more than which stone you picked, because placement decides how often it shows when you talk and when you laugh.

I do not rush that part and I do not want you to. If you sit down and leave undecided, nothing is lost. Looking is free.

What people are actually worried about before they walk up

Nobody says it out loud, so I will say it for you. Three things stop people:

• Hygiene in a country you do not know. You cannot read the language, you cannot check anything, and you are being asked to trust a room you found on a map.
• Too many choices and no way to tell them apart. Search for this in Hanoi and you get a wall of listings that all look equally confident.
• Language. A lot of studios here do not work in English, and nobody wants to negotiate something on their face through a translation app.

I cannot fix the first one with a sentence on a web page, and I am not going to try. What I can tell you is that I work in English and Vietnamese, so you will understand what is happening before it happens and you can ask me anything mid-way. And the photos on my Instagram are my own work — not stock images bought to fill a grid.

The rest you judge for yourself when you are standing in the room. That is the right way round.

Who sits in my chair

Two kinds of people, and they book completely differently.

Most of my guests are travellers — mostly women in their twenties, from Europe, the US and Australia, some from Korea and Japan. Solo, or with one or two friends. They find me on Google Maps, on TripAdvisor, on Instagram, or because someone at their hostel said a name. They decide fast, usually the same day they message.

The others are Vietnamese, sixteen to twenty-five, who found a process video on TikTok and turned up because it looked good and the price was not scary.

The two groups get on better than you would expect. Some of my favourite afternoons have been a traveller and a student from Hanoi in the same room, neither fluent in the other's language, both waiting their turn.

What is in the room, and what it starts at

So you know before you climb the stairs:

• Piercing — from 250,000 VND, about $10
• Grillz — from 1,900,000 VND per tooth, about $76
• Small tattoos, done by my husband in the same shop — from 800,000 VND, about $32

Those are real starting prices, not bait. What moves them is what you choose, and the total is agreed before anything begins. If you want something bigger than a small tattoo, that is a different conversation and a different price list at More Tattoo — I will walk you across the room rather than guess a number.

The part that is not on the price list

Come as a guest, leave as a friend.

I did not buy that line from a branding agency. It is what usually happens.

The gem is the door. What people remember a year later is not the tooth. It is the egg coffee down an alley they would never have found on their own, the Old Quarter once it gets dark, a cheap beer on a plastic stool on Ta Hien, the sun going down over West Lake.

That is the Hanoi most visitors miss entirely — four days of the same three attractions, then the airport. I like giving that part away. It costs me nothing and it is the best thing I have to give.

I am not printing the addresses here. Half the point is that someone who lives here takes you.

What I will not promise you

This is the part most studios leave out, so read it twice.

I am not a tour guide and this is not a package. Some days the shop is busy. Some days my husband and I are both working through until close. Some days I have a life. When the coffee happens, it happens because it happened — not because you paid for it.

So come for the jewelry. If the rest of it follows, good. If it does not, you still got what you came for, and you have not been sold a promise I cannot keep.

If you only have a few days here

One piece of practical advice, free: come near the start of your trip rather than the night before your flight.

Not because anything goes wrong, but because if you want a second look at something, you are still in the city and I am still ten minutes away. People who come on their last evening are the only ones who ever leave a little tense, and it is avoidable.

Where to find me

Second floor, 12 Cat Linh, Dong Da. Any day between 10AM and 7PM. There is no booking system you need to fight with — send me a message on Instagram at @glint9_hn, or just come up.

If you want to know whether people have been happy here before you commit, my Google Maps reviews are in English and there are enough of them to get a feel for the place.