Your school is already listed here. Take it over.

Why your school is already here

Polish Perfect is a directory of nail schools for every city in the country, next to its directories of salons and supply stores, and a directory with gaps is useless to the student searching it. So a school gets a page whether or not its owner has ever heard of us. That page carries the basics a student needs to find the door: the name, the street address, the phone number, and often the hours.

The catch is that the basics are all it has, and nobody is responsible for them. If the admissions line changed last spring, the page still shows the old one. If you moved to the bigger campus across town, the map pin didn't follow. An unclaimed page can send students to a disconnected number for years and you would never know, because the calls simply don't arrive.

Claiming is how you take that page over. It costs nothing, and the only thing we check is that you can answer your own school's phone.

What claiming changes on the page

Three things change the moment a claim goes through. The listing gets a Claimed badge that visitors can see. Everything on it becomes yours to edit, and whatever you type stays put. And the school moves up a tier: on the city page and the program pages, claimed schools are listed above unclaimed ones before any other factor is counted.

That tier rule is the reason claiming matters more than anything else you could do to the listing. A school with one photo and a Claimed badge sits above an unclaimed school with everything filled in, in the same city, on the same day. The rankings guide walks through the whole order; the short version is that claiming is the only step that jumps a tier.

How the claim works: a search and a phone call

The whole thing is built around one fact that only the school can prove: you can pick up its phone. There are no documents to upload, no license to photograph, and nothing to mail. Here is the sequence, start to finish.

1. 01Sign in or create a free account. The search lives behind sign-in so a claim is always tied to a real account. If you start from this page, the search brings you straight back after sign-in.
2. 02Type your school's name. Results appear as you type, labeled by type, so a school and a salon with the same name are easy to tell apart. If the name is common, pick your state to narrow the list. Schools that are already claimed show as Claimed instead of a button.
3. 03Pick your school and check the preview. It shows the name, the address, and the last four digits of the phone number we have on file. That number is where the call will go, so if it isn't your school's line, stop here and read the next section.
4. 04Press Submit Claim. Within a few seconds an automated call rings the school's number and reads out a six-digit code. Nobody from our team is on the line.
5. 05Type the code in. The code is good for ten minutes and you get five tries. Missed the call? Wait thirty seconds and press Call again; it reads a fresh code to the same number.
6. 06You're verified, on the spot. A correct code approves the claim instantly. The listing's status flips to Claimed, your account becomes an owner account, and a Go to Dashboard button takes you to the listing.

The code always goes to the number on the listing, never to a number you type in. That is what makes it hard to claim someone else's school: a stranger would have to answer your front desk. It also means the number on file has to be right, which brings us to the next section.

If the call can't go through

Some listings have no phone number at all. Some have a number that no longer rings, or one that can't take an automated call, like a line that goes straight to a menu. The claim doesn't fail in those cases. It stays open and goes to a person on our team instead.

• No number on file: the claim goes straight to review. You'll see a note saying so, and a button to your dashboard.
• The number can't be reached: same thing. The claim is saved and queued for a person to look at.
• The number is wrong: the call goes to whoever has that number, not to you. Don't submit the claim; the review queue is the better path. Send the correct number to support@polishperfect.co and mention the school name and city.

Review is done by hand, so it takes longer than the three minutes above. You can keep an account open while you wait, and a claim you've started picks up where it left off if you come back to it. You can only have one claim waiting at a time, so finish or resolve it before claiming a second campus.

What you can edit once it's yours

The dashboard opens on the listing's overview, and from there every part of the public page is yours to change. The list is built around the questions a student asks before calling.

• The basics: name, phone, website, address, and a description in your own words.
• Hours for each day of the week, with your time zone, so Open now means open now.
• Programs, from a list of ten: nail technician, cosmetology, esthetics, barbering, makeup artist, permanent makeup, lash extensions, instructor training, salon management, continuing education. For each one, the clock hours, the length, the tuition, and the kit cost. Tuition shows in large type on the program card, with the kit cost under it.
• Accreditations and approvals: NACCAS accredited, state approved, financial aid eligible, GI Bill accepted, Pell Grant eligible. Up to two show as badges under the school's name, and all of them in their own section.
• Outcomes: your state board pass rate, job placement rate, and graduation rate, as percentages. They show in the quick facts at the top of the page and in a Student Outcomes section.
• Up to three specialties, such as a student salon on site, evening and weekend classes, small class sizes, kit included, job placement services, career counseling, or financial aid available.
• Photos: upload your own, choose the one that leads the page, and decide which existing photos stay. Photos you don't approve are never shown.

Most of those items also count toward how complete the listing is, which is the biggest factor inside a tier. Programs with tuition weigh the most, then accreditations and photos. The rankings guide has the full order.

What only a claimed school can do

Editing is the obvious part. The rest of the dashboard is the part schools tend not to expect from a directory.

• See who's looking. The overview shows views this week and in total, how many of them were nail techs, where you rank in your city, and how many people tapped your phone number, asked for directions, or opened your website.
• Post an open house. An open house, free workshop, tuition discount, or enrollment special, live seven days. It goes to the feed of every tech and owner in your radius, to the public school deals page for your city, and onto your listing. How the feed works for schools.
• Post a referral reward. Student referral with a reward from one hundred to five hundred dollars or your own number, instructor referral, or salon partnership, live sixty days.
• Post a job. Instructor, admissions, or front desk, salary or hourly, with the programs the role covers, live thirty days, with applications arriving in your dashboard inbox.
• Turn on Featured. Your school sits at the top of your city page, above the list, from the day you switch it on. Boost starts at five dollars, and every claimed school starts with free credit toward it.

If your school isn't listed yet

New schools, and the occasional school we missed, won't come up in the search. Add it instead: the search page has a link for that, or go straight to add your school. The form asks for the same basics a claimed listing has, and a couple of things are different from a claim.

• We check for a double first. If a school with the same phone and address already exists, you'll be sent to claim that one rather than create a twin.
• The code comes by text to the number you enter, since there is no number on file yet.
• The listing is yours right away, but it goes public after a quick check that the school is real. You can keep editing it in the meantime, and it joins the claimed tier the day it goes live.

The first ten weeks

A newly claimed school gets a lift in the order that fades a little each week and is gone after about ten. It's there so that a school that just claimed gets seen while it fills the listing in, not as a reward for claiming by itself. Use the window.

1. 01The day you claim: fix anything wrong. Phone, address, hours. These are the fields that lose students when they're off.
2. 02The first week: your programs with tuition, your accreditations, your pass rate, and two or more photos of the school. Those are the biggest pieces of completeness, and tuition is what a student compares.
3. 03The first month: a real description and your specialties. Then post the next open house.
4. 04Every month after: change something. Freshness scales everything else, so a listing that's complete but untouched slowly loses ground to one that's kept current.

Do that and the lift fading away won't matter, because by week ten the listing is holding its place on its own. Find your school and start.