Teamwork was the key to this month’s cover, which coincidentally looks like the “go team” handshake that you can see little leaguers do before they race onto the field before a game. Eriko Kurosaki, a salon owner and educator for EZ Flow Nail Systems in Tokyo, and Danny Haile, EZ Flow's CEO, worked together to ready our two models for NAILS’ Spring Polish Preview cover. On the first model, Kurosaki did tips with overlays to extend the model’s natural nails to match those of the sec­ond model, whose nail length was evened out by Haile with sculpts. Both models’ nails were filed by their respective nail technicians, then Kurosaki finished the job. “To make the nails on both models look as similar as possible, we had one technician do all of the finishing and shaping,” Haile explains. “Each technician has a personal way of shaping and finishing a nail and even though I could have gotten it done, this was the only way to make them perfectly alike.” Haile and Kurosaki, along with Tom Holcomb, had just flown in from Japan two days before our shoot, where they hold ongoing educational seminars for Japanese nailists. When they arrived back in the states, they shot an educational book on designing with colored acrylic (which will be available mid-year) and then came to shoot the NAILS cover. The next day, they were on a plane back to Japan to continue EZ Flow’s Japanese educational program.

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, Click here.