Every nail appointment begins with a translation problem. On one side of the table: a person who knows exactly what they want, in the way you know a song you cannot sing — vividly and unspeakably. On the other: a skilled professional being handed a screenshot of someone else's hand, taken in someone else's light, and asked to guess which three of its ten decisions actually matter. Most of the disappointment in this industry lives in that gap. Not in talent, not in taste — in translation.
We are a small team, and we became mildly obsessed with that gap. The answer we kept arriving at was unfashionable: the fix is not more photos, more filters or more feeds. It is precision. A nail set is a stack of real decisions — shape, length, base, tip, finish, art, finger by finger — and if you let people actually make those decisions, three things happen at once. The client sees the true set before committing to it. The artist receives a recipe instead of a riddle. And the appointment starts at “yes” instead of at twenty questions.
What Nailly is
A design studio where you build your exact set — eight shapes, four lengths, any colour, french tips, five finishes, stickers, lettering and freehand art, per finger. A try-on that renders the design onto a photo of your own hand, processed entirely on your phone. A city board where you post the finished design and real artists in the US and Canada claim it, quote it and book it in chat. And for artists, a working studio: their kit, chair QR invites, requests, booking statuses, waitlists, refill reminders at the three-week window, private client notes and Salon Mode at the chair.
What we believe
Honesty over hype. Every feature described on this site is real and in the app today. When something is not built, we say so — including on this site's pages for salons and other audiences, where you will find plain sentences about what Nailly does not do.
Privacy as architecture, not settings. Hand photos never leave your phone. Your GPS location never leaves your device. There are no ads, no third-party trackers, no data selling and no AI training on your content. We make money from memberships — customers $19.99 a month ($9.99 with an artist's invite), artists $29.99 a month, every account starting with a free week — and that is the entire business model.
Artists are the point, not the product. Nailly takes no commission on appointments. The price of a set stays between client and artist, and the tools exist to make both sides of the table better at meeting each other.
Where we are
Nailly is built for the United States and Canada, in English, and is coming to the App Store. If you have a question this site does not answer, email yelmastafi@gmail.com — a person reads it, and replies.