There is a lot of talk on the messageboards about the Good Old Days, when you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over a dozen beautifully manicured women with long nails. Was that really the case or are we looking back with rose tinted spectacles?

Unfortunately there is little science we can apply. 20 years ago we didn't have the photographic records then that we have now of everyday life, there was no Flickr!, no Nailbytes, no real way to measure the popularity of nails in the street. The only archive we really have is the photographic history from the media and we have used this to create a trend chart of sorts. Our qualifier was to only look at women with commentable nails who were at the top of their profession, and to record them while they had long nails.

A good example of our sample set is Cher. Early pictures show her with bitten nails. Then there is a period where her nails are truly noticeable and stand-out, followed by the more pedestrian length she sports until the present day. For our purposes we are only counting when her nails were long, but even if they were long now we wouldn't count her because she is no longer at the top of her game, either as an acress or singer.

So, here are the women we came up with for our analysis. If you can think of any we have missed please let us know and we'll include them:

Barbra Streisand	Cher	Coko	Dolly Parton	Flo-Jo	Gail Devers
Glodean James	Ivy Queen	Mutya Buena	Michelle Visage	Anna Mikhailova

So what are the results? Click on the image for the full chart where you'll see that over time there have been 3 good periods; 1972-75, 1992-93 and more recently 2003-2007.

If you have any thoughts on this and would like to discuss further, please use this thread on the Nailbytes board.