Underlining mine. Was that a woosh? Like a 
?
I will try to post a pic of my nails after I get the done this weekend.
Just FYI: you will not be allowed to wear any type of fake nail in nursing school–they harbor bacteria. Some schools will not allow nail polish. Mine did not, but I went in the dark ages.
As to the acrylic nails–the first pic is ok, but I would prefer to see natural nails done in a French manicure. I have only seen nail art on working class women and on minority women, specifically the pts who come into my same day surgery dept. I had a pt once who had an actual legal tender dime superglued to her left ring finger nailbed. I have no idea why. We could not get it off, so we had to tape it up for her surgery. Yes, it looked stupid. (sorry, I sort of digressed there. I was thinking about nails etc and she popped into my head. She has nothing to do with fake nails. The rest of her nails weren’t fake. And now, back to the thread!)
I don’t care for the look, myself (re fake nails-I’m quite disorganized in my post here!), but some of them look nice and some of them look terrible. The more elaborate they are, I think the worse they look. YMMV.
I like nail polish, but I prefer nicely groomed natural nails.
I think you’ll find regional differences, too. I don’t see nearly as many nail parlors here in Baton Rouge as I do in greater New Orleans, for instance. Sure, some of that is population, but acrylics are much more popular there, it seems.
Sorry to post twice, the the title of your photo reminded me of an Impressionist painting or similar. “Still life with blue sky” type thing!
WhyNot-your nails look fine, as do Ellen’s. They look groomed and neat. Can’t ask for more, IMO.
I like to wear blue nail polish or lavender on my toenails. For some reason, I think that nail art on bit toes might be kind of fun. It’s casual and fun for summer, but again, anything can be taken too far…
I don’t think all acrylic nails are trashy, but I am puzzled by the popularity of the squared-off nail. To me, nails look more graceful (and make fingers look longer and thinner) if they are rounded, rather than bluntly square, at the tip.
The local mall is full of 14-30 year old white girls sporting short French manicures. Usually I associate it with low-rent trashy girls, but most of the girls around here are from McMansion communities(I think trashy still fits the bill though). Ya know, Daddy’s an engineer, Mommy may or may not work, but the house is spotless, and we have a dog named Spike type families.
Actually, the moms usually look just like their teen daughters.
Overdone = trashy. I like well groomed, naked fingernails best. My nails have been awesome since I quit painting and buffing them. I just file the tips and leave them alone.
Short french manicures and nails like WhyNot’s look nice too as long as they’re maintained.
For toenails I like fun colors - pink, blue, purple, etc. as long as they don’t protrude past the end of the toes - ew!
I got the nice French manicure looking nails (fairly short, too) for Easter. I never have been a girly girl, and my nails have always been weak, splitting easily, even before the chemo that just about finished them off. I didn’t even make it a week before I was driven nuts by them. I do custom jewelry beadwork, and I found it impossible to pick up eensy-weensy seed beads with those things. I even ended up with a tiny bead wedged up between my fake nail and my real nail, which was extremely painful to dig out. It might have been my health problems (Raynaud’s, RA) but they felt like someone was pressing down on my nails every moment of every day. I ended up ripping them off with nail clippers. Not my finest moment. 
I go halfway between squared off and the graceful oval. They seem to hold up to the daily beating they take on the keyboard. I don’t like the super-squared-off look. They’re just too pointy on the corners.
I do my own French manicure, but I don’t like the really stark white part. Here’s my routine (after all the buffing, filing, cuticle work, etc):
1 coat of base coat or top coat
1 coat sheer opalescent pink
1 coat of a frosted pearl white on the tip
1 more coat of the sheer opalescent pink (tones the white down just a tad)
1 coat of top coat
It depends on the shape of your fingers, actually. A nail that follows the shape of the end of your finger will make your fingers look longer and thinner. Mine are squarish, but with rounded corners, just like my fingers are. Ovals or, god forbid, points, just make my fingers look bloated and too large for my nails. If you have oval finger tips, then ovals will look good on you.
Square is also a lot faster for the technician, which might be part of why it became more popular as a nail shape with the rising popularity of nail salons instead of do-it-yourself home manicures.
When I had natural nails (for that second and a half ), filing them into ovals seemed to make the edges break more. They seemed stronger and less likely to break in a more square shape with just the corners rounded. Maybe that’s where it came from.
That is so interesting. I’m guessing this is because of the slang term, dime, which is used to refer to a beautiful woman. (You know, 10 out of 10.) Kind of clever.
Tell me about gel nails if you’ve had them. What’s the difference between gels and acrylics?
She wouldn’t tell us why she had it on there–and I didn’t know about the slang term. Thanks for the enlightenment! (or course, we didn’t ask straight out why it was there–we treated it like a fake nail. We tell people no body piercings, but this didn’t seem to fall under that category). Of course, she might have had it on there for a different reason than 10/10… who knows?
That’s partly it but also you can really only maintain a real square shape with acrylics; real nails are too fragile. And the point of acrylics is not necessarily to look natural, it’s to accent your hands which is something I think may posters aren’t getting. It’s also pretty much a generational thing, the nail tech tell me only older women get rounded nails.
Heh. This thread inspired to go get my nails done, for the first time in over a year.
I usually get darker colors, but I wanted something more “spring-like” today.
This is a little off-topic, but does anyone else feel like their nails “can’t breathe” when they have nail polish on? Whenever I wore it I was always very conscious of the fact that there was something covering my nails, and it annoyed me. Not to the point where I couldn’t wear it at all, but I didn’t really like it.
Dunno, maybe over time you notice it less?
Oh, and Hazel, cute nails!
This is an interesting conversation. For whatever it’s worth, I noted when I first started working in a law firm that most of the female assistants had fake nails and none of the lawyers did. When I was in college I had fake nails for awhile, because I was a nail and cuticle biter. However, the time, money, and inconvenience factor finally cured me of them. I always had to have a lot of them soaked off and redone because I am really really hard on my nails. Also, I was a food server - – we made our own salads (rather than getting them from the cooks) starting from a big bin of lettuce. Somehow one of my nails…um…came loose into the bin of lettuce, without me noticing. Another poor server served a salad containing my nail to her customer. :eek: :eek: :eek: I went out and apologized them and they got a free dinner, of course. They were really cool about it, considering the bacteria and disgustingness factors and the fact that a broken-off acrylic nail is extremely horrible-looking on the underside usually…becomes discolored and looks almost as germy as it is…
Currently my nails are pretty short, just past the ends of my fingertips - maybe an eighth of an inch or so - and unfortunately I have discovered that this particular brand of (very pretty) red polish chips like a mofo, so no pics from me. But, my natural nails have been VERY long and I can still type, put in my contacts and wipe my own backside, and I work with art materials and tools all the time with the biggest issue an occasional dent in my left thumbnail where I’ve absent-mindedly used it as a fulcrum for bending wire. Oh, and I can’t really use the little fingerpots metallic waxes (Rub & Buff) come in. I do not mind getting my hands dirty, but I can’t stand even a hint of yuck under my nails. I can see why people would squick about longish nails because, well, stuff DOES get under them.
I also occasionally go goofy and paint my nails crazy colors, or draw pictures on them. While I’m not working-class, neither am I in a professional setting where it might be better to have a lower profile, so I figure what the hell. If I want striped fingernails, there’s no good reason I shouldn’t have them.
My only problem with acrylics, gels and glue-ons is that they are often done badly and look like someone glued Chiclets across their fingers. The super-long nails in the OP’s second link are done well, and while I think they’re a bit flashy for every day, I don’t find them tacky or trashy.
HazelNutCoffee, nice simple nails, very cute. But why’d you hide that even cuter smile? 
A nice plainly done set of acrylics (provided they aren’t Dragon Lady talons) would preferable to the nails I have to look at every day & described in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=406275&highlight=Veuve_ClicquotNJ
VCNJ~