by PHILIP FINE

Nail polish enthusiasts might want to give a thought to a Montreal professor the next time they're waiting for the varnish to dry. McGill's Phillip Servio has come up with one of the hottest and most curious developments in the fashion nail world.

Before he arrived in Montreal this past fall, the 28-year-old newly-hired thermodynamics professor spent time coming up with a material that will give fingernail fashion divas something to wave in your face. The B.C.-born and American-trained scientist developed a nail coating that, with ink-jet printing and image analyzing software, makes it possible to print tiny intricate photos on your 10 fingernails. And the bonded image will not crack or peel off under a variety of social conditions. So, someone sporting a mid-career Elvis on their nails, for example, will not have any sideburns bleed into those famous dozy eyes and will never be embarrassed by the little image falling into a party host's ashtray.

A printer-like machine called the NailJet Pro will apply one of thousands of available images onto your nails, using innocuous ink-jet technology onto Servio's ink-receptive polymers. This technique had never been used before by an industry that uses high-temperature toxic dyes on web appliqués or hires Asian artisans to paint naïve images on plastic nails.

In just four months on the market and without launching any major campaigns, a small Florida company called ImagiNail has received 2,000 orders for the NailJet Pro, with plenty of buzz in South America, Europe and Japan. With 50,000 salons in the United States alone and a world-wide fashion nail sector estimated at $11-billion (U.S.), it could give our McGill patent-holding prof royalties to rival anything coming from the more serious federal granting agencies.

McGill did not hire him for his nails but for his work on something called hydrates, which is a phenomenon he has worked on since 1997. The earth's permafrost and seas have massive amounts of natural gas locked inside crystallized reservoirs and he has discovered how to unlock that gas and, in the process, found a method to transport drinking water.

A former colleague of his has applied for the Quebec rights to distribute the fashion nail applicator. But for now, with Montreal's only NailJet Pro in his office, Servio finds himself in a position to give students some special favours not mentioned in any campus handbooks.

Molecules attract

Mirror: Before we ask you about the NailJet Pro, I need to know about your inspiration. Who were the women from your childhood who had great nails?

Phillip Servio: My grandma and my mom hardly ever painted their nails so it didn't come from there. That's for sure.

M: Before they hired you, you say ImagiNail had already thought up the idea of transferring images from a computer onto nails. Was the company having a problem with the technology before you got there?

PS: There was a serious problem. The coating they had would just peel off. I developed a way for it to stick to the nail and not come off. The image is also much sharper and brighter.

M: And it lasts as long as conventional nail polish?

PS: It should last up to a week.

M: So how did you do it?

PS: When you have a molecule, it will have a charge. The polymer has a cationic charge and the inkjet that fires out is anionic. It's like a negative attracting a positive.

M: So how did that make it become more receptive?

PS: When the ink hits the ink-receptive coating, it fixes itself because it's attracted to the polymer coating. It doesn't want to move because it's electrically bonded.

M: When you were conducting some final tests on the NailJet Pro, did you find yourself having to walk around with painted nails?

PS: Amazingly enough, I haven't tried it. But most of the people at the company are men and they do walk around with painted nails to be able to give me longevity tests.

M: If you would do it, which designs would you choose for yourself?

PS: Definitely more the guyish type of designs, like the skull and crossbones or a hockey team…

Beauty of the future

M: So a person who wants to get this done just puts one hand at a time inside the printer?

PS: The holder has four finger slots. You can't do your thumbs at the same time because they point sideways and your fingers face upward. So, you put four fingers in, switch to the other hand, put those fingers in, then put your thumbs in, facing upward. And that's basically how it works. It takes about 25 seconds for each [run]. So you're looking at under a minute and a half to do all 10 fingers on the machine.

M: What do customers say the product does for them?

PS: They walk away pretty happy that they have something different and new. It's like the next generation of nail painting. It was bound to happen that people weren't going to be satisfied with solid colours and begin to want more intricate designs.

M: All your academic articles are on the study of hydrates. Why are scientific journal publishers not yet ready for a paper on the best ways to make Easter Bunny images stick to nails?

PS: They probably are. I just started working on this a little later. My heart still is in the hydrate research, the reason being that hydrates are going to have such a huge impact on our future in terms of energy.

M: ImagiNail hired you to work on their product when you were still a doctoral student. Would you encourage your students to apply their talents to the scientific needs of the fashion and novelty sectors?

PS: I would. It broadens your horizons. I see this in terms of more than just an application for women. I plan on trying to develop chip-resistant paint later on. It's a stepping stone.

Ivory tower meets salon

M: What office colleagues or visitors have you treated for a nail application?

PS: Some of the secretaries. The faculty, unfortunately, is all male so they're not the keenest on getting anything done. A couple of graduate students, male and female, also got them done. I guess the male professors don't want to be going to class with anything painted on their nails. It might be kind of strange for their students to accept. Actually, none of the students I teach this semester know about this yet. So maybe I'll keep that quiet until they finish the term and do well in my course.

M: We haven't talked much about hydrates. What are you working on right now in that area?

PS: I'm trying to research more in the field and better understand its properties. The biggest drive for studying is that there exists 10,000 billion tons of the material stored naturally on earth. It's storing natural gas, which is the cleanest burning of all fossil fuels. That's double the amount of fossil fuels we have in the world. And it's untapped. So it's kind of nice for me because I'm one of the only guys who studies this. Crystallization is quite a cool phenomenon and the ability for these crystals to store this natural gas is just amazing. And of course there's the economics of it all, because all that gas is quite valuable. So, I try to develop techniques and technologies to be able to use this one day as an energy source. That's what I spend most of my time on.

M: But your work on nails is what gets you into the newspaper.

PS: Exactly. The funny thing is, in the academic community, the hydrates are what get me the glory. Everywhere else, it's the nail thing.