I've come to a reluctant truce with flares and we've been negotiating a treaty for the last year or so — we still have some fine points to work out, but thus far, flare nails and I have been able to live in peace with each other. Basically, I accepted defeat at the request of my clientele and raised the white flag ... and stopped griping every time someone says, "I really like the way those nails flare, can you do mine like that?"

... grumble grumble ... "Yeah, OK."

The hard part to doing flared nails is that it goes against everything I have studied and practiced for the last 20 years to learn to sculpt the ideal nail structure. It's really, genuinely, difficult at this point to intentionally allow the nails I sculpt to flatten out like Doritos. So even when I sit down and purposely sculpt a set of flares, I have a tendency to unconsciously "fix" them at the next fill, which just leads to having to go back and re-flare them later.

What can you do? I realized that trends change all the time — I could get all highfalutin and refuse to do the nail styles that are popular right now, but that seems a bit like proverbially cutting off my nails to spite my hands. (That's how that saying goes, right?)

Nevertheless, flare nails present a host of corresponding issues. The worst of which is that they create a tip-heavy, off-balance extension. Between the additional product required to create the flared sides and the extra thickness to embed multiple layers of glitter, Mylar, polymer clay slices, and nail art, it's just too much. The thickness won't allow the nails to break, so they just lift. And then clients whose nails never lifted before come in and show me their talking puppet-nails and act like I'm supposed to be surprised.

Apparently I have just been shouting into the wind all this time and they've never heard a word I've said about why flare nails are not the way nails are supposed to be sculpted.

Like every mother who watches her teenager get dressed for the day ... I will be so glad when they outgrow this fad.