Nails Salon is live. Eight countries, one directory, no paid placement.
Finding a nail salon in an unfamiliar city is still weirdly hard. Search engines send you to aggregators that let salons pay for the top spot. Booking platforms only show you the salons that pay them. Instagram is where the talent lives, but you cannot search Instagram by city and gel type. Yelp is Yelp.
So Nails Salon is a directory. Not a booking engine. Not a marketplace. Not a place to buy nail polish. A directory in the old-fashioned sense, a list of real salons, indexed by city and service, with enough information for you to decide whether to walk in.
What is on the site right now
Every salon we list is added by us, not by the salon owner. Nobody paid to be here. We index the salon's own website, cross-check the address, note the services listed, add a short description, and file it under the correct city. If we cannot confirm the salon is still operating, we do not list it. When a salon closes, we remove it.
We cover eight countries at launch: the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Each country runs on its own version of the site, in its own language, with its own currency, its own booking platforms linked, and its own city pages written by someone who understands the local market. A Berlin page does not read like a translated New York page. A Stockholm page does not treat Södermalm the way a Manhattan page treats the Lower East Side.
Search works two ways. If you know the city, browse by city. If you know the service (gel, BIAB, russian manicure, chrome, pedicure), browse by service and pick your city inside that. If you just want to know what is nearby right now, the near-me page uses your browser location and returns a ranked list.
What Nails Salon is not
We do not take bookings. When you find a salon you like, we send you to the salon's own website or to whichever booking platform they use, Vagaro or Booksy in the US, Treatwell in the UK and Germany, Planity in France, BokaDirekt in Sweden. We do not sit between you and the salon. We do not charge the salon a commission. We do not charge you anything, ever.
We do not sell products. If you want press-on nails, gel polish, cuticle oil, look elsewhere. There are plenty of good sites for that.
We do not run sponsored placements. A salon cannot pay to move up in a city list. Ranking inside a city page comes from editorial judgment: service depth, verified operating status, how long the salon has been running, whether the website reflects a business that is actively taking clients. Those criteria are published and we do not deviate from them.
We do not accept press releases from salon PR firms and turn them into spotlights. Journal posts, the section you are reading now, are researched from public sources and cited. If we cannot cite the founder's backstory to a real interview, we do not publish the founder's backstory.
Why now
The idea started in early 2026. The domain went live in March. The first salons were indexed in the weeks after. We opened the site publicly once we had enough coverage per country to make browsing useful, which for some markets meant thirty salons and for others sixty. Countries with thin coverage right now (France, the Netherlands, parts of the UK) are marked as such, and those pages are set to noindex until we have real depth. When we cross the threshold, we open the country properly.
The Journal section is where we will talk about the industry itself. Salon openings and closings. Awards. The people running interesting studios. Regulatory shifts. Trend reports pulled from what is actually happening on salon floors in specific cities. Every post here will be sourced.
What to do next
If you are looking for a salon, start with your country page (/us/, /uk/, /se/, and so on) and search from there. If you run a salon and want to be listed, submissions go through the contact page, send your website and address and we will verify and add it.
If you have a story worth writing up, an opening, an award, a founder we should profile, pitch us the same way. Editorial only, no paid placement. That has not changed since the day we started building this, and it will not change.
Welcome.