Good grief, what is wrong with manufacturers? Seriously, manufacturing nail products should be like filming CSI: There should be an "industry consultant" on every set. That way, when a chemist or marketer or whatever — with no first-hand, personal experience behind the desk, doing nails on real, live clients, on a real schedule — comes up with some groovy plan to put all their product in cutesy packaging where every bottle looks exactly alike, a real, live nail tech would be there to slap 'em upside the head!

The photo shows just a smattering of products that I currently work with that require my meticulous attention to make sure I don't totally *&#@!-up what I'm doing. Base and top coats that look exactly alike! Especially from the top, which is how I see most of my products because they live in a drawer. And the Nailite products — one is a protein bonder and one is a tackless gel top coat — talk about two different things! Really? They couldn't at least put different colored labels on them?

I didn't include Hand & Nail Harmony's terrific trio of pH balance, bonder, and cuticle oil — which are all in the exact same bottles and all look nearly identical unless you pay special attention to the minute differences in the color of the interior liquids.

It's crazy. It's as though the people who produce these products are totally clueless about how they will be used in the field. That those bottles will be stored in drawers and we'll need to be able to grab the correct one without slowing down to carefully read the labels — which, of course, we have to do because they can't bother to simply change the colors so the base and top coats don't match!

I am one of the believers in the table organization philosophy that I should know exactly where everything is so I don't have to slow down to find things. It helps tremendously with keeping my flow on schedule and not looking like an incompetent oaf. But lately, I have been collecting some products that have really thrown off my groove — these labels are indistinguishable from one another and that means I need to take more time than I feel is necessary to double-check that I've grabbed the right thing.

And yeah, I take the time to pull out a Sharpie marker, use a dot of polish, colored Duck Tape (no, not "duct" tape — the brand name is "Duck" that makes all the fabulous colors), and whatnot in order to make it easier to tell things apart ... but why do I need to do that? NSI and CND both had the good sense to put their base and top coats (for Polish Pro and Shellac, respectively) into bottles with clearly different labels, why can't everyone else?