After the coronavirus pandemic took her job, her mother’s livelihood and her father’s life, Emily Uhlig needed a way to make ends meet.

She found it in an unlikely place: the enormous collection of semi-cured gel nail strips that she had amassed while much of the world was shut down.

Ms. Uhlig, 37, of Westhampton, Mass., was at the vanguard of a trend. The strips, which are applied to the nail, trimmed of any excess, cured under an ultraviolet light and filed, are the latest iteration of nail wraps to garner a cult following. S.C.G.s, as the strips are known, often feature intricate designs and allow consumers to effectively give themselves a manicure at home for a fraction of the time and money they would spend at a salon. When correctly applied and cared for, the nails can last up to two weeks.

In a previous life, Ms. Uhlig had run a tanning salon that also offered gel manicures. The salon shuttered long before the pandemic, but it gave Ms. Uhlig a knowledge base when it came to gel manicures. Then one day in 2020, she saw an ad for Ohora, the South Korean brand credited with starting the craze around the at-home gel nail strips.

“It was like gel nail polish had a baby with a regular nail wrap, and you had the ease of application of a regular wrap with the durability of gel,” she said. “I saw this and I was like, ‘This is amazing.’”

Over the course of about a year, from when she discovered the nail gels to when she was laid off from her job in retail management in 2021, Ms. Uhlig’s collection of semi-cured gel nails grew so large that she estimated that it would have taken her 16 years to wear them all. Around the time she was laid off, her mother lost her job as an administrative assistant at a school, and her father collapsed in the family’s kitchen shortly after he tested positive for Covid.

With money suddenly tight, she found a financial lifeline, and a sense of purpose, in her nail strip collection. She started selling sets in a Facebook group, Ohora & Other Semicured Gel Nails, one of several online communities where people sell the imported nail trips and trade tips and tricks.

That money, she said, sustained her for three years.

Coveted Designs From Japan and South Korea

Like Ms. Uhlig, many fans of the colorful nail kits are not simply buying a box or two for an event, but rather amassing collections.

In a storage unit in Houston, Naomi Seijo has more nail sets than she knows what to do with. She estimates that she has more than 2,000 sets in a collection. Because she is a content creator who often posts about her nail sets, that collection just keeps growing.

Ms. Seijo, 30, said she was not a “nail girlie at all” until she first came across S.C.G.s in a social media ad in 2022. She had never had the money to pay for intricate designs at nail salons, nor the ability to do them herself at home.

“When I put them on for the first time,” she said, “my mind was blown.”

The nail cosmetics industry in the United States generated roughly $1.72 billion in revenue in 2024, according to Statista, a provider of market and consumer data. It’s not clear how much, or how little, of that was driven by sales of semi-cured gel nail sets, but there is ample anecdotal evidence that they are becoming more popular.

Many of the most sought-after sets come from Japan and South Korea. Crunchbase, which provides data about private companies, estimates that Ohora, one of the most popular brands, has annual revenues between $50 million and $100 million.

Ohora did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Seijo frequently organizes group orders for exclusive Japanese sets as a member of the Ohora & Other Semicured Gel Nails Facebook group, which Ms. Uhlig now helps run. Access to those nails is limited to people with a Japanese phone number and address, Ms. Seijo said, so she relies on her family in Japan to help her with the group orders.

After Ms. Seijo alerts members about a group order, a custom Facebook Messenger bot she developed records each request she receives. Relatives in Japan purchase the items and ship them to her in Houston, where she then unpacks and individually repacks the sets before mailing them out.

Ms. Seijo said she has shipped nail sets to more than 300 people and handled about $74,000 over the last year.

The search for rare sets that are no longer in production — Ms. Uhlig calls it “unicorn hunting” — is a big part of what keeps people coming back to her Facebook group.

“I’ve been able to get every single one that people have looked for,” she said. “It might take me a few months,” she added, “but I will get my hands on it.”

The demand for nail sets from overseas has also given rise to American brands. Among these is Lit Gels, which Julie Kim founded in Springfield, Ill., in 2023. The name, she said, stands for “love, inclusive, thrive.”

“It took a lot of planning and a lot of years of just thinking about it really before it actually became anything,” she said.

Two years on, Ms. Kim, 43, an instructional designer by day, said Lit Gels has packaged and shipped nearly 4,800 orders to customers around the globe. So far the company has about $168,000 in total sales, with individual orders averaging around $35, she said.

Ms. Kim’s nails are made in South Korea (there are no American manufacturers of S.C.G.s, she said) meaning that even her U.S.-based company is subject to the Trump administration’s 15 percent tariff on South Korean imports. If that does force her to raise prices, she said, she hopes it will be by small amounts.

“I’m trying to just not hyperfixate on it and move forward with my business and take it day by day,” she said.

Finding Friendship and Community in Online Forums

Over time, Ms. Uhlig’s Facebook group and other online forums devoted to S.C.G.s became more than places to talk nails. When disaster strikes, natural or otherwise, they band together. After one member lost her collection in the Palisades fire in Los Angeles earlier this year, for instance, others rallied to help her replace what she had lost. When there’s cause to celebrate, they do that, too.

Ms. Seijo makes most of her income through brand deals as an S.C.G. content creator, sharing videos primarily on Instagram and TikTok, and says she does not profit from the group orders that she arranges. She has a new website where people can shop from her collection, with no markup, despite her attachment to the nail strips as a “collector to a lot of these designs.”

“I don’t really want to hoard such beautiful designs and then not have the plan to wear them,” she said. “I’ve come to be OK with letting them go so other people have the opportunity to enjoy them.”

“Plus,” she added, “the extra space would be nice, too.”