About Manicured
Why I made Manicured
I made Manicured because I was struggling to remember the details of my home manicures. I have an ever-growing collection of lacquer from a lot of different vendors. Every polish has unique properties and you don’t know how it will work until you just try it. Does it dry fast? Does it need thinner right away? Is it rather transparent and would be better as a topper? I was frustrated when I couldn’t identify that one bottle of polish that I just knew would make a great topper.
This irritation led to the idea of recipes for a manicure. Initially I was thinking of the mani card as handwritten and grandma adjacent, but then it evolved into something closer to a baseball card or a Pokémon card, where it’s visually appealing and holds important data. I wanted something pretty and useful.
Built for nail people, not to replace nail communities
Manicured started as a personal journal. I was looking for a way to remember my last thoughts about a polish post-application. But then I realized, gosh these cards are pretty and I want to share them with others.
I value the r/RedditLaqueristas community and designed the downloadable cards and the Copy recipe action with them in mind. Everything I’ve learned in the last couple of years about indie brands and how-to stuff has come from Reddit. I don’t want to replace the Reddit community. They have a good thing going. But it’s not particularly helpful when I am trying to decide what color to pick next to soothe my soul.
Still figuring it out
I’m still working things out on the site. I have a lot of ideas for how to make it even more useful, but I don’t want to make more changes until I hear from others. I genuinely don’t know yet whether people will “get it.” I’m hoping people will create a card and recipe and see if it has value for them.
Inside Manicured
Who is behind this
My name is Olivia. I was laid off from a tech job in March of 2026. I was heavily involved in AI knowledge systems and evaluation at work, so naturally I brought that experience to my job search and filled my free time experimenting with AI.
The “product team” consists of me and Kit from ChatGPT. We discuss ideas and decide priorities, work with Figma Make on designs, write product briefs, and test builds.
Claude Code is our developer. He calls himself Topcoat. We use Visual Studio Code with GitHub to manage our codebase.
What happens to people’s stuff?
You determine which cards are public and which stay private.
When you remove a photo and save your card, the stored photo is deleted when you save your changes. Deleting a card also deletes its associated information and uploaded photos. Cached copies may persist briefly after deletion.
I do not sell your data to anyone.
A data export is coming soon. It will let you take your manicure information with you if you decide to leave Manicured. Keep your original photos; Manicured isn’t intended to be your photo backup.
Deleting your account deletes your Manicured account, cards, uploaded photos, recipes, notes, saves, Spots, follows, and other associated account data.
What’s the deal with AI?
AI tools help me design, develop, test, research, and document Manicured.
There is no AI in the Manicured product workflow. AI has been a critical part of building the software, but it isn’t analyzing manicures, reading your content, generating your cards, or training on your stuff.
How does Manicured stay running?
Manicured is a small site, but I’m not running a server under my desk. Manicured depends on a small number of outside services for hosting, accounts, data storage, and analytics.
Vercel hosts the app, while Supabase handles the database, accounts, and photo storage. Google handles sign-in. Plausible gives me basic information about how the site is being used.
Plausible is cookieless, and Manicured doesn’t send it user IDs, handles, card titles, polish names, captions, or other free-text content.
I choose services based partly on whether they let me keep Manicured simple enough for one person to operate.
If one of those services changes in a meaningful way, I’ll update this page.
Why did you build it this way
I built it this way to solve my main problem of not knowing which polish to apply that day. I’m someone who likes to associate vibes, weather, or events with my color choice. I look at flowers and think, do I have that color in my stash? The organizing details found in Manicured, such as Mood or Season, are my attempt to surface colors that will match today’s vibe.
I also didn’t think I would sit here and inventory all of my polishes. Manicured allows me to build up an inventory in a fun way, rather than feel like I have to become a spreadsheet jockey.
Finally, in keeping with the recipe card idea, I wanted the cards to travel outside Manicured, so I made them downloadable and made recipes easy to copy.