The Ultimate Guide to French Nails and How to Tell if You’re Getting a Good One

Written By Valentina Anh
Hands with nails featuring classy white thin French tips nail art over a nude chrome base for weddings.

From our coworkers at the office to the celebrities we see online, French nails adorn the hands of women all around us. With its iconic lines and an almost minimalist purity, French nails have endured through time to become an essential and eternally classy nail design. It’s certainly one of the most popular designs that our clients ask for at Atelier Anaiis, and we don’t see that trend changing anytime soon. 

But with the popularity of French nails everywhere comes the responsibility to ourselves - learning the elements of the design to understand why it’s a misconception that the design is simple to do, as well as being able to differentiate the good and the bad versions of French nails. What makes one set of French nails the equivalent of those flawless Ferragamo heeled mules, and another set akin to mules from Steve Madden? Sure, they’re both mules but we also know that they’re completely different, not just by way of their respective price points. 

In this guide, we break down the good, the bad, and the ugly of French nails, taking you through their history, ubiquity, and execution. We walk you through the continued evolution of French nails with examples from our Gallery. We discuss why we never do French nails on clients with damaged nails at Atelier Anaiis, giving you reasons to reconsider if you’re walking down that path. Best of all, by the end, you’ll be able to have an informed opinion on the French nails you’ve had done at the nail salon near you, and whether those nails are worth the money you’ve paid. If this interests you most, you can skip to that section here.

Table of Contents

The Good - The Origins of French Nails

An Evolution of French Nails by Category

Fantastical - Enchanting and Spirited

Reminiscent - Retro Glamour

Alfresco - Joyous Colors

Modern - Asymmetrical Departures

Boho - Free Spirited

The Bad - The Ubiquity of French Nails

The Ugly - The Execution of French Nails 

Closing Thoughts

The Good

The Origins of French Nails

We begin our exploration of French nails with the most obvious place to start: the name. Even as nail technicians with decades of experience very familiar with painting French nails on countless clients, we drew a blank when it came to knowing the history of the design. We wondered, in what regal and beautiful neighborhood of Paris did they come from? Which famed French fashion designer created the design in their atelier? 

As it turns out, French nails, in fact, didn’t come from France, nor were they invented by a French fashion designer. In 1977, movie directors in Hollywood were frustrated: frustrated by the time-consuming nail changes that needed to happen for their actresses between outfit changes for different scenes. So they asked Jeff Pink, the President of ORLY International - a beauty supplier headquartered in LA - to come up with a time-saving solution. 

Pink came up with what ORLY calls, to this day, The Natural Nail Look - in what could be seen as an accentuation of how our natural nails look as they grow out, he painted the nail tips with white polish, then put a neutral toned polish over the rest of the nail. The studios at Hollywood loved it. They loved the look and all the time and money it saved them. (Between us, we couldn’t help but wonder about the poor health conditions of the actresses’ nails, who essentially had to get multiple regular nail polish manicures every day they were on set. Yikes. We wrote all about the nail damage that regular polish and acrylic powders cause at our Nail Health blog post.)

Pink took the Look to Paris for Fashion Week in 1978, where the perfect name dawned on him: the French Manicure. Once Cher and Barbara Streisand wore the look for their respective appearances that year on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson - and even talked about it during the show - the general public was introduced and we’re still enamored by French nails to this day.

Barbara Streisand Classic French Nails

Ms. Streisand with her French nails.

The Versatility of French Nails

The versatility of French nails cannot be overstated. Perhaps the chief reason why the nail design is so revered, French nails have come a long way since their fairly utilitarian origins to cut time spent changing nail polishes on Hollywood actresses during movie shoots. They’ve evolved in a myriad ways. Through nail shapes - from square to soft almond to natural. Through color - from gleaming white to pink monochrome to Portugal Blue. Through lines - from medium French to thin French to double French. Through shades - from clearly defined to blurry to ombré. And they’ve evolved through their messaging - from Hollywood studios to New York ballrooms to the everyday. 

All of this evolution over time has ensured that French nails will shine for every occasion and purpose. As seen in our blog post, The Best Wedding Nails for Brides, French nails are amongst our favorite designs for wedding season. Every single example of French nails that we highlight in that blog post has a different message and feel - from minimalist to maximalist, and everything in-between. All this despite the structural backbone of the design being the same across all of them. French nails really are the Swiss army knives of nail design. To show you how far they’ve come from the original French Manicure, we present examples of French nails from our Gallery - without any filters and organized into categories - below.

Fantastical - Enchanting and Spirited

Hands with nails featuring thin gold French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn blooming roses and honey bees.
Hands with nails featuring delicately thin black French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn butterfly wings on the third and fourth fingers.
Hands with nails featuring unique black and white French tips nail art resembling clouds over a matte nude base with hand drawn celestial clouds with stars and the moon.
Hands with short natural nails featuring neutral French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn gold bows.
Hands with medium nails featuring fantastical black and light blue French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with hand drawn stars and snakes.
Hands with long nails featuring aged gold French tips nail art over a translucent sheer mauve purple base with hand drawn roses and camellias.
Hands with long nails featuring black French tips nail art over a nude base with hand drawn silver bows.
Hands with long nails featuring classy teal French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn sun, stars, and moon.
Hands with long nails featuring purple, green, silver, and black glitter French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn purple, silver, and blue butterflies.
Hands with long nails featuring textured gold French tips nail art over a shiny silver base.
Hands with long nails featuring red and white French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn outline of Mickey Mouse and Disney stars.
Hands with medium nails featuring white French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn holly trees for the holidays.

Reminiscent - Retro Glamour

Hands with medium nails featuring shiny retro gold abstract French tips nail art over a glossy nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring classy thin black French tips nail art over a glossy nude pink base.
Hands with long nails featuring classy green French tips nail art over a glossy nude pink base with hand drawn present bows for Christmas and the holidays.
Hands with medium nails featuring creamy lime green French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn white lines.
Hands with medium nails featuring textured cat-eye velvet black French tips nail art over a matte royal purple base.
Hands with medium nails featuring glamorous retro silver French tips nail art over a glossy nude base.
Hands with long nails featuring retro orange creamsicle colored French tips nail art over a lighter orange base.
Hands with medium nails featuring soft glitter gold and glitter red French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn red bows for Christmas and the holidays.
Hands with medium nails featuring textured cat-eye velvet black French tips nail art over a matte chocolate brown base.
Hands with short natural nails featuring nude pink reverse French tips nail art over a glitter candy red cat-eye velvet base.
Hands with medium nails featuring black French tips nail art over a matte black base.
Hands with medium nails featuring red, white, and pink triple French tips nail art over a glossy pink base with hand drawn pink and white hearts for Valentine’s Day.
Hands with short natural nails featuring gold French tips nail art over a glossy nude base with hand drawn poinsettias for Christmas and the holidays.

Alfresco - Joyous Colors

Hands with long nails featuring neon yellow, orange, and blue double French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with ombre.
Hands with short natural nails featuring ballerina baby pink French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with short natural nails featuring thin baby blue French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with hand drawn white and blue flowers.
Hands with medium nails featuring overlapping orange and yellow French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring glossy new age punk rock purple French tip nail art on a clear base.
Hands with medium nails featuring dreamy baby blue French tip nail art on a nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring yellow, purple, blue, green, and pink French tip nail art on a nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring yellow French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with hand drawn yellow flowers.
Hands with medium nails featuring vibrant green chrome French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with short natural nails featuring pink and yellow French tip nail art on a nude base with hand drawn pink and yellow flowers for vacation.
Hands with medium nails featuring thin dark green French tip nail art on a sophisticated marbled forest green base.
Hands with long nails featuring neon pink swooping French tip nail art on a glossy light pink base with soft gel extensions.
Hands with long nails featuring neon pink swooping French tip nail art on a glossy light pink base with soft gel extensions.
Hands with medium nails featuring thin pink, yellow, orange, blue, and purple square French tip nail art on a nude base.
Hands with short natural nails featuring hand drawn white and yellow daisies outlining French tip nail art on a nude pink base.
Hands with short natural nails featuring alternating thin orange and purple French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with orange and purple dots.
Hands with long nails featuring red, blue, green, orange, and purple abstract French tip nail art on a glossy nude base multicolored polka dots.

Modern - Asymmetrical Departures

Hands with long nails featuring very thin red micro French tip nail art on a glossy white base with hand painted red brushstroke.
Hands with long nails featuring modern medium French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with teal, orange, white, and green ombre.
Hands with short natural nails featuring asymmetrical swooping red double French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring asymmetrical gilded silver French tip nail art on a glitter nude cat-eye velvet base.
Hands with medium nails featuring asymmetrical black French tip nail art on a nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring asymmetrical deep gold medium French tip nail art on a milky white base.
Hands with medium nails featuring asymmetrical black double French tip nail art on a matte nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring asymmetrical silver medium French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with medium nails featuring black, blue, and orange double French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with checkerboard pattern.
Hands with medium nails featuring asymmetrical white and pink double French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with hand drawn watermelons, strawberries, and pineapples.

Boho - Free Spirited

Hands with medium nails featuring elegant leopard print French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with long nails featuring multicolored pastel medium French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with translucent swoops.
Hands with medium nails featuring tortoiseshell French tip nail art on a glossy nude base.
Hands with long nails featuring turquoise and gold double French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with abstract gold swoops and gold reversed French.
Hands with long nails featuring crimson red French tip nail art on a glossy white base resembling Thrasher flames.
Hands with short natural nails featuring soft brown and creamy white French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with soft brown checkerboard pattern and white marbling.
Hands with medium nails featuring Barbie pink and fuchsia French tip nail art on a glossy nude base with hand drawn pink and fuchsia checkerboard pattern and flowers.
Hands with medium nails featuring medium white French tip nail art on a nude base with hand drawn checkerboard pattern, outline of flames, and 3D cherries.
Hands with long nails featuring black and white French tip nail art on a nude base with alternating hand drawn black and white stars.

The Bad

The Ubiquity of French Nails

The enduring popularity and timelessness of French nails has resulted in the design becoming accessible everywhere at all different price points. Wherever you are, if you’re dying to get French nails, you can probably make that happen. You can walk into the neighborhood nail salon, ask for a French, and they’ll understand the general idea. 

But. 

Just because you want something, doesn’t mean that it’s what’s best for your health. There are plenty of examples from other walks of life that come to mind here: junk food, alcohol, staying up too late, anyone? Part of what differentiates nail salons like Atelier Anaiis that specialize in nail health is the clear order of priorities: for us, our clients’ nail health always comes first, with everything else falling into line behind it. French nails, as popular as they are, are not a nail design that everyone should get, when nail health is the number one priority. Nor are they “simple” nail designs - a common misconception. Here’s what we mean. 

When we look at any French nail design, we notice the different colored polish on the nail tips, or the “free-edge” as medical and nail professionals call it. The main distinguishing characteristic of French nail designs, this is achieved by applying additional nail polish just at the tips on top of the base coat that covers the entire nail plate, resulting in additional weight placed just at the tips. You may think that such small weight has no impact on the structural integrity of the nails. And when French nails are done on clients with perfectly healthy nails, it has minimal impact. But when executed on a client with damaged nails - thin, peeling, or discolored nails - that miniscule amount of additional weight at the tips can have devastating consequences, routinely resulting in bending, cracking, and even more peeling of the nails. Imagine the nail tip as a diving board that you’re about to dive off of into a pool - French nails on damaged nails are like dangerously jumping up and down on a precariously thin, cracked wooden diving board. It’s only a matter of time before the nail tips crack. The fact that most nail salons don’t have a conversation first with their clients with damaged nails, explaining the negative impact French nails can have on their nail health, is an unfortunate byproduct of its popularity and the rotating-door business model of most nail salons. 

Speaking of the rotating-door business model of most nail salons, French nails aren’t a nail design well-suited for quick, thirty to forty-five minute nail appointments either. For a nail design that’s characterized by its lines - elegant arched lines that must carefully be hand-painted - nail technicians being rushed is entirely counterproductive and all too common, making it very obvious that the French nails were done in a hurry. Bumps, crooked lines, and random waves on the arched lines of French nails are telltale signs of bad French nails. We’ll explore this more in the next section, The Ugly: The Execution of French Nails. 

At Atelier Anaiis, we believe that the majority of the quality of any manicure is determined by what we do with your nails before any nail polish touches your nail plate. Cuticle Care and nail preparation is of utmost importance to us, evident through the time and care that we spend on those aspects at every appointment. This effort directly correlates to how long our manicures last on our clients at peak condition, without chipping - the majority of our clients come back every three to four weeks with their nails still perfect, albeit being grown out. 

If we apply our philosophy that the majority of the quality of any manicure is determined by Cuticle Care and nail prep, it’s no wonder that most French nails out there aren’t great. The majority of nail salons skip Cuticle Care and nail prep entirely to speed up each appointment, eager to get you out and the next client in. In the context of French nail design, this is particularly troublesome, directly resulting in bad French nails that will hardly last the client two weeks.

The Ugly

The Execution of French Nails

Through our more than decade-long experience of being nail professionals, we’ve come to appreciate every client’s nails as unique canvases, with all different lengths, widths, and curvature of nails. Looked at closely from the free edge, each of our nails - even in the healthiest of conditions - grow in their own ways. They don’t all grow absolutely straight, smooth, or even in the same directions from the nail matrix. In fact, depending on how we use our fingers every day, they adapt and adjust, changing their shapes and directions of growth constantly. Understanding this brings us to the topic of execution of French nails, and why French nails are far from simple nail designs. 

We can think of French nails like we do couture lines from our favorite fashion designers. Just like the often spectacular couture dresses, French nails have strict design parameters - aspects that make them “French.” And just like couture dresses, French nails, at their best, are measured, crafted, and tailored for each nail of a client. This includes not only accounting for the unique widths, lengths, and natural shapes of each of the client’s nails, but also considering the arch of each nail plate and the direction of each nail’s growth, before we even discuss the emotional aspects of the design: its base color, thickness of arched lines, the type of gel polish used, and the color and number of lines. If we know that no two nails on the same hand have the same measurements, let alone two completely different people, we can begin to appreciate why executing French nails beautifully is far from a simple proposition, with the mind boggling number of factors that our nail technicians have to take into consideration as they execute the manicure. 

From a big picture perspective, the difficulty of French nails can be broken down into two main topics: symmetry and curing. In the section above, we discussed how each of our nails grow in their own unique ways, much like how perfect symmetry in the measurements of the limbs of people is often rare. This means that to achieve symmetry with French nails on all the fingers so that the whole hand looks beautifully unified when clients are out and about, each nail has to be shaped in their own way by the slimmest of margins. It’s important to note that nail shaping is not just about the free edge - without the cuticles being shaped to match, we can forget about unity and symmetry. Symmetry in real life is more complex than its book definition: executing French nails is never as simple as just copying and pasting the inspiration pictures that clients show us. This is true even for more contemporary French nail designs, as we saw in the section of modern and asymmetrical French nail designs from our Gallery - asymmetrical nail designs only work within the parameters of symmetrical nail shaping. Done without purpose, asymmetrical nails are just a mess, presenting more like traditional French nails without any effort or care. 

Of the visible characteristics of bad French nails, we now focus on bumpy and wrinkled nails. When looking at bumpy and wrinkled French nails from the side, there will be pronounced bumps that give the illusion of waves, and the nails will be lacking the beautiful smoothness we always see from manicures that are well done. This is the result of improper curing - either over curing or under curing. Because French nails have so many different parts to it, there are multiple curing times - the time to “set” or harden the freshly applied gel polish through heat in curing lamps. For example, the arched lines of French nails which only cover the nail tips, have to be cured for a shorter amount of time than the base layer, but not so short a time that they don’t fully cure. Under curing has the possibility to lead to some scary issues - if under cured, the nail polish can develop air pockets on the nail bed that look like little bubbles. These air pockets will eventually tear, creating holes on the nail bed that perfectly trap bacteria and lead to a fungal infection. Infections are a much bigger problem than chipping or peeling, requiring months to rehabilitate. Over curing is similar to over baking cookies - it results in extreme dryness, leading to brittle nail polish that chips easily.

Closing Thoughts

At Atelier Anaiis, we believe that nail designs should be the cherry on top of the sundae. As we wrote in our Nail Health and How to Heal Nails blog post, the foundation of Cuticle Care and nail prep is what separates the good manicures from the bad and the ugly. This is true for French nails and every other nail design. Taken a step farther, based on our priorities for our clients’ nail health, we cannot say that any great manicure is worth its cost without proper Cuticle Care and nail prep. Like constructing a house, a house without a solid foundation is a house that isn’t all that valuable. 

As you look forward to your next manicure appointment with French nails in mind, we encourage you to be wary of nail salons that insist that they can get French nails done quickly and cheaply. They are quick and cheap because the bulk of the manicure process is skipped. Properly executed, French nails, with all its precision and nail preparation required, will take more time and cost more than a single color manicure. And done right on healthy natural nails, they are utterly magnificent. If you want to explore French nails for your next special occasion, our team is here to help - fill out our intake form for your first appointment with Atelier Anaiis. 

Valentina Anh
Next

The Best Wedding Nail Designs for Brides