When it comes to the perfect set of acrylic nails I am an expert. I can do my own, having been taught by some of the finest manicurists in the Pacific, but I still prefer to have them done by someone else because it’s very relaxing. I’ve also been doing nails for others for a very long time and should probably suck it up and get my license so I can teach all the manicurists I’ve met in the past 2+ years how to do them properly.

My nails have only rarely gone without acrylic since the process first became commercial in the late 70′s. That’s thirty years of dealing with my hands in an almost obsessive way. These digits have appeared in TV commercials and training videos. Strangers used to stop me and take my hands into theirs and admire them…and I was never one to shirk my responsibility to upkeep one of my two best assets. I was fastidious about maintaining my manicure until I moved to San Diego.

Back in the early days, manicurists used a very thin brush and the process could take up to two hours because it was a precise craft, an art form. There were no dental drills converted for use on one’s nails so all the filing was done by hand. It cost a bunch: $95 for a full set of acrylics, $40 or so for a fill. Small shops of 2-4 women sprang up everywhere around Honolulu. I made the rounds for a year before settling on the best of the bunch – a nice shop run by a great lady named Carmen that was called, appropriately, Carmen’s Nail Salon. Her staff was responsible for my hands and feet for about ten years.

In the mid-80′s the first of the Vietnamese operations popped up, touting cheaper manicures. The little art shops disappeared and an influx of these inexpensive salons took over. These folk were precise, yes, but not about doing nails. They were precise about the amount of time they spent on each customer. The very thin brush was replaced by the fat brush and an imported dental drill sat at every station. They used questionable chemicals and marched customers in and out like a fast-food chain. I was desperate to find another Carmen in the midst of this explosion of mediocrity.

That’s when I met Anna, the proud mother of quintuplets (!), who ran a tiny shop next to a strip joint and employed exactly two other people. On the recommendation of an entertainer friend I strolled into her hidey hole after a long string of shows and said, “I need these fixed and I need these fixed right. Give me your best manicurist because I’m very, very picky.” Anna sat me down and gave me an acrylic fixer-upper in half the time it used to take, with the same results as her artistic predecessors. I would pay for things in a store or a restaurant and women would stop to admire my nails. They could never tell whether they were natural or acrylic. And Anna, knowing I took great pride in my hands, would call me excitedly when she learned a new design or had a new product to try because I could get away with being her experiment. Crystal nails, gel nails, wrapped nails, nail stickers, hand-painted nails, dangling nail jewelry, french nail tips with glittery powder. We did all kinds of things to my hands. For nearly twenty years, as Anna’s reputation soared and her business grew into a huge operation, she and Cathy (the only other person allowed to touch my hands) kept me primped and polished.

Once, while appearing on a Japanese TV show, the subject turned to my nails and the beauty of the design on my fingernails (Anna’s creation). That’s the importance of it for me, that Anna made me – or at least my hands – look very, very good and in turn I could cause quite the sensation.

And then I moved.

Lord have mercy, this place has got the worst manicurists on the planet. Dozens of shops in dozens of places, some better than others, all falling short of delivering the perfect manicure or the perfect set of acrylics. As my sister can attest, I came to dread having to maintain my fingernails. But it wasn’t just the little Asian outfits that were harbingers of doom, it was also the high-end shops with words like “Chez” or “Atelier” in their names. My poor sister tried to help me find another Anna but to date only a couple of manicurists were halfway trainable. They also proved to be extremely inconsistent.

I was in Ocean Beach today (“OMG, mom! It’s the Chick-Fil-A!”) with three hours to kill and a mother who needed entertaining. I turned to Yelp for some help in locating their highest-rated nail salon, which happened to be Paradise Nails & Spa on Rosecrans. The place is spotless and the women are friendly. It’s a very nice salon. Was it worth 5.5 stars on Yelp? Not to me. So while I sat in the plush leatherette seat of their plush pedicure spa, staring at my triangle-tipped acrylics and shuddering at the prospect of reshaping them when I got home, I pondered the whole situation. Why on God’s green earth would women in this city (and others) think they were getting great manicures?

It occurred to me that those women who hand me change or a credit card slip to sign, those women in grocery stores and banks and delis and at work, have never had a perfect manicure. They’ve never known a Carmen or an Anna (or an impossibly thin Cathy) who could muster up perfection from a little bit of chemical and a ton of artistic workmanship. They expect triangle-shaped nails because no one’s ever given them anything else.

So this is for you, ladies, because you really need to know what you should be getting from your top-rated salon: remember these points and apply them liberally at your next nail appointment, because I don’t think we’re going to stem the tide of mediocrity in all these salons if we don’t start demanding perfection for whatever we pay.

1. Acrylic nails are supposed to look natural. They’re not supposed to look like fake nails.

2. The perfect shape is a rounded square – rounded at the top corners to match the curve of the cuticle. You can get what’s called a squared manicure and in a couple of days it’ll become oval. No harm in that, except for those first two days when you might lacerate your loved one or rip the letters off your keyboard.

3. Look at the tips of your nails. Are they wider than the cuticle area? Consider this unacceptable. Very few fingers grow nails that way, most grow them fairly straight. But even if you have nails that tend to grow wide, acrylics can mask Mother Nature’s flaws when applied correctly. You should never have super-wide tips in relation to the curve of your cuticle. The upper corners of your nails should mirror the outer edges of your cuticle so you have nice, straight lines no matter what angle you view them from.

4. The top should be curved from side to side and smooth from top to bottom. You should be able to run your finger over a freshly-filed acrylic and not feel anything – if you do, demand (nicely) that they go over it again.

5. The thickness of the nail should be equal on both sides. A good acrylic is slightly thicker down the center of the nail and should follow the curve of the top of the finger. This has nothing to do with whether you like your acrylics thick or thin but has everything to do with the expertise of the manicurist. When the acrylic is a tad bit higher in the middle, the polish will shine along that area and make your finger look longer.

5. The salon should use nail glue under your nails as they grow out, otherwise your real nail will begin to separate from the acrylic. You can do this yourself but it looks more natural after a buzz with the drill to dull the shine.

6. No one needs to file the “bottom” of your nails except to even them out (and that’s generally because they’re sloppy). The proper way to shape the nail is to file it straight along the sides of the nails, not underneath the tips. When a salon is using the file underneath, have them stop….otherwise, as your nail grows out, you’ll see the side of your natural nail and a crazy 1/8″ shorter version of it that’s acrylic. The word for it is “ugly.”