French Toast.(French manicure)

Byline: editor: Sarah Brown

With a few crucial tweaks, an '80s classic makes a thoroughly modern comeback. Sally Singer wears the new French manicure.

How could something so terrifically tacky feel so chic? This was the question as I watched my French manicurist giving me a French manicure. It was the summer of 2007, and I was on the Champs-Elysees at the Guerlain spa, which is a secret Shalimar-scented oasis that seems a million miles away from the madding and mainly touristic crowd tramping along the boulevard below. Chloe had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time oiling, trimming, and pushing my cuticles. Now, with a little frown, she had embarked on the smile--the white tip that gives the French manicure its edge. Or, if you listen to most modern women, its ergh . For if there is one beauty move that at a stroke (make that two strokes of bright, whitish varnish) will put you in the company of Carmela Soprano, Jenna Jameson, and soccer wives, it's la manucure francaise --as it's never called in France, possibly because in France nobody wears it, unless they're Russian.

But how to explain, then, that ooh-la-la feeling that is the be-all and end-all of beauty? When Chloe left my fingers resting on pink silk pillows, I was grinning as broadly as my nails. They looked like shells of the palest, palest warm pink. And then the tips: soft, soft white, and looking cleaner than they'd ever looked. And pretty. Whereas normally they wore a uniform of clear gloss or a buff and looked chic and efficient and (it now struck me) a tad uninspired. Whereas now my two-tone, shortish nails, filed and rounded so as to present the same curves at the tip and base, were simple, subversive, and elegant at once. (Says Jan Arnold of Creative Nail Design: "An almond-shaped nail does for the hand what a stiletto does for the foot.") Remember, we're not talking acrylics, talons, long shiny sickles. We're talking about the endgame of beauty culture at its most modern and subtle and grown-up. We're talking (if I may be permitted to coin a phrase) high-maintenance natural .

Strange to relate, the origin of the French manicure was precisely this: to look as natural as possible while being glamorous. Jeff Pink, the head of Orly, is able to tell me this because it was he who invented the French manicure in 1976 as a practical way of allowing Hollywood actresses to wear a nail style through a variety of costume changes. It was called the Natural Nail Look; only a year later, after Pink had traveled to Paris and introduced the look to catwalk models, did it receive its gloriously spurious nationality and name. By the early eighties, it was a full-blown craze in America. Cher and Barbra Streisand, whose nails had long been celebrities in their own right, favored the look, and a zillion new smiles gleamed across the country. When I went to see Ji Baek, the owner of Rescue Beauty Lounge (in New York) and author of Rescue Your Nails (Workman), she recalled, "That was when manicures were a luxury and French manicures said, 'I get my nails done.' It was a time before BlackBerrys." It was also the time of shoulder pads and curly perms and other retrospectively challenging concepts. Style simplified in the nineties, and so did fingers and toes. (Says Georgy-anna, the legendary Los Angeles buffer whose white zinc "nail ink," applied under the tip, offers an alternative to painted smiles, ...