Have you ever walked into your favorite lunch place — one that you’ve been going to for like 30 years — and looked at the menu and mentioned casually to the 18-year-old behind the counter that you miss the sandwich that had all the cheese on it and let you pick one of the meat choices … only to have the 18-year-old behind the counter scrunch up his nose at you with a perplexed look as he informs you that, “we’ve never had a sandwich like that.”?

As you age, these things will happen more and more often. It has never ceased to amuse and confuse me how common it is for people to think that just because they don’t remember something, it must have never been so.

Take nail art. And this article about it: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/10/living/fashion-week-nail-art/index.html, for instance.

I read through that whole article. It’s a good article. It gives some much-deserved publicity to some great artists both in, and about, our industry (because I’m not quite sure where we categorize the blogging community yet).

But I can’t help but drop my head and shake it in dismay and disbelief that the writer gives credit to the “fashion designers and celebrities” for putting nail art in front of mainstream America. Mainstream America has been aware of nail art for 30 years. It’s the fashion designers that were slow to pick up on it.

Zooey’s famous tuxedo art? I was wearing it when she was 5. In fact, I happen to have a warm, fuzzy, purely anecdotal story about tuxedo nail art exactly like that, from 1993.

For as long as I’ve been doing nails, both professionally and as an enthusiast before that, nail art and design has been the driving force behind my interest in the medium. I’ve never not had a clientele with an interest and appreciation for nail art.

They say “everything old is new again.” I’m old enough to have had the opportunity to witness enough cycles to know how true that is.

Nail art isn’t new— it’s new again. And this time, we have the Internet so this time we can see not just how popular it is, but what type of nail art is popular where and with whom.

I wish I’d had a Tumblr account in 1985. I’d have had a gazillion followers! (BTW, I do have a Tumblr account: http://artofnailz.tumblr.com/)