Why Nail Designs Are The Most Predictable Beauty Trend
Analysing 12 Nail Trends to Understand How to Predict Customer Interest
While haircare, skincare, cosmetics, and body care all fluctuate as the buzziest beauty categories, nails remain consistently predictable. Unlike other beauty categories, nails follow a trend cycle more akin to fashion—but why?
In today’s newsletter, we’ll explore the evolving interest in nails over the past 15 years to illustrate the predictability of the nail trend cycle. Next, we’ll explore twelve of TikTok’s most popular nail designs through search volume and growth percentages. This analysis will demonstrate why these designs have garnered so much interest and allow us to predict their future trends.
Global Interest in Nails
Interest in nail services began before the pandemic. Global Google search volume for "nail salon" rose 209.7% between 2010 and 2020, and was four times that in Australia (840%). Post-pandemic, that growth slowed significantly with search volume decreasing -13% between 2020-2024.
In the last year, we are starting to see that trend take a turn. Between January 2023 and October 2024 search volume has risen, but only by 1.2%. When you compare this to the search volume of nail content on social channels, this minimal growth can come as a surprise. If we look at TikTok for example,
‘Fall Nail Ideas’ has had 1.05M searches in the last 7 days.
‘Halloween Nail Inspo’ has had 475k searches in the last 7days.
‘Junk Charm Nails’ has had 226k (driven by creator @theryanjayshowofficial) in the last 7days.
This demonstrates that, while nail services are only just beginning to recover from the pandemic, the trend cycle is alive and well.
Seasonality
You may have noticed in the above graph the patterns of the peaks in interest, let’s look at that further. If we take the global Google search volume for ‘nail salon’ in the last five years and view it by month, it looks like this.
At a glance, the largest peak in December would likely be attributed to Christmas, but that's not the full story. If we repeat the same analysis but localise the region to Australia, we notice a significant difference.
Despite having only about 7.8% of the U.S. population, Australia generates nearly half as many monthly searches for ‘nail salon’ (≈80k/month) as the U.S. (≈160k/month). This suggests that the significant peak in December can largely be attributed to Australians’ interest in nails for the summer season. If we repeat this analysis once more for the United States, this reveals the same peak in interest during the summer season.
Nails are one of the only beauty categories that are considered ‘highly seasonal’. With a trend cycle comparable to fashion, the northern and southern hemispheres have opposing 'peak' seasons, which can skew global analyses and mask regional differences in demand.
Nail Design Trends
What about current social media trends like duck nails, BIAB nails, and cherry red nails? Design trends within the nails category follow a slightly different cycle.
To understand their popularity, we need to dig deeper into the data. We’ll analyse a sample of twelve of TikTok’s most viral nail trends, examining patterns in Google search volume and growth metrics.
This analysis will give us a clearer picture of the trend landscape, helping beauty professionals understand how to best leverage the seasonality and predictability of nail trends.