Maggie Rants [and Raves]

Why Did You Do That?

by Maggie Franklin | August 28, 2013 | Bookmark +

For the most part, I think I’m pretty wise to the fact that we — as professionals — are all different. The industry is comprised of thousands of different people working within it and almost as many different philosophies, ideas, and ethics.

 

Some of us are all aboutthe natural nail. Whatever we do, our priority is preserving the health and integrity of that natural nail. Some of us are all, “Meh, whatever. If their natural nail was important to them, they wouldn’t be getting fake nails.”

 

And, mostly, I understand that. I embrace our diversity of thought, and I try not to vilify the techs who do things differently than I do. I figure the clients will decide which work ethic and technical philosophy they prefer, and the professionals will build our clienteles comprised of likeminded consumers.

 

But every so often, I find myself working on another tech’s work and wondering, “WHY did you do it this way?”

 

Sometimes that thought process is in the midst of the tears I shed as I desperately try to salvage the post-apocalyptic fall out of a previous tech’s work. Sometimes it’s not a matter of a destroyed nail or endangered health of the client — I’m just looking at the mess I’m trying to clean up and thinking, “You know, if you’d just put down a layer of clear first...” Which, of course, has nothing to do with whether the original nail tech did anything wrong or not, so much as she could have done something that would have made undoing it or changing it easier. Like a layer of clear acrylic under the colored acrylic that you put on my last client’s toenails, because I know you were going to file that off too, not soak it.

 

As for cases where a tech shows utter disregard for the continued health of the natural nail? You do know, don’t you, that if you completely destroy that nail your client will stop getting her nails done for at least a few months. If you do that to all your clients’ nails, won’t that mean you won’t have clients to work on? It just seems like such a no-brainer.

 

But then, many times in my lifetime it has been pointed out to me that I ask “why” more often than most people. Maybe you just didn’t think it all the way through first.

 

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