On Manicures and Making Plans
Synthesizing everything I’ve learned about nails in the past year, I still have no understanding of what makes them innately appealing. Rouge and lipstick have their evolutionary purposes; we flush and blush during intercourse, so we naturally react to those products.
But nails? I’m still unclear on an explanation for their attraction, but I have felt their appeal since I was a teenager, moon-eyed at the thought of one day having enough money to get acrylics and keep them. It seemed like the height of success to me, an appearance-obsessed, small-town Texan—not a girl, not yet a woman.
If nails’ attraction isn’t inherent, it must have something to do with how they make us feel. Don’t you remember the first time you had them done? Tracy, “a solidly-built thirty-year-old” agrees, telling Suzanne E. Shapiro, author of “Nails: The Story of the Modern Manicure,” that her nails make her feel “sexy, sophisticated, attractive, noticeable.” I would add that nails give me “soft power,” an apt phrase I once heard on NPR after a nail appointment. Nails make me feel perfect, polished.
Imagine being perfect. Imagine how your nails might run over the keyboard, just tap-tapping as you sit with your perfect posture at your perfect job, knowing your nails will never chip on a key. You type out all of the things you want to say in a way that is above reproach, in a way that will be praised.
I have always wanted to be perfect, but this impulse quickens as I get closer to its achievement: when my job is going well, when I’m feeling pretty good, when I find myself in a stable relationship that’s cresting its zenith. Nails feel in line with the good-girl-to-girlfriend-to-career-woman-to-wifey path life seems to be funneling me into.
In many ways, my nails have gentrified me — streamlined the chipped edges, ironed out my unpolished eccentricities like how I like to eat bread and sleep until 11. These glossy ovals on my fingers have returned me to a former version of myself — the smalltown girl who craves a boyfriend, the young woman who doesn’t know you’re supposed to want more than bleached curls and highlighted cheekbones. I thought nails signaled success, and I kind of still do. Success to me meant perfection.
Nails have long been a Thing. In centuries past, Chinese women wore nail guards to prevent the natural nail from breaking, which reminds me of the way I put a Band-Aid over my finger to tape a broken nail between appointments. The French also adore nails; nail services first began in Paris in the early 19th century and American women, attuned to any sort of fashionable exoticism, were soon introduced. Simone de Beauvoir, a French woman, was always manicured and wore hers red, purple, or scarlet; Jean-Paul Sartre loved them. Personally, my man says my manicured nails make him come five seconds faster. But American men traditionally didn’t like the artificiality of bright-colored, fake-looking claws. Common sentiment says that changed during World War II when they were faced with the red talons of pin-up Rita Hayworth as their only female companionship.
Back at home, wartime nail polish was cheap enough to be the only luxury many women could continue to indulge, even as they tightened the belt on meats, sweets, and clothing. Red was the color of choice in the post-war years until the baby boomers grew up and rebelled against their mother’s coloring with the full spectrum of hues. My own mother declines to get her nails done because of some unexplored feminist impulse, though she views pedicures as a common decency.
Nice nails, like nice feminism, found an apex in the business culture of the 1980s which was friendly to women who took care to manage their look, their clothes, their bodies. They continue to be an office staple. I’ve heard more than one woman in a nail salon wonder if her nails are too long, too loud, too much to be job appropriate.
Around this time, Black nail culture entered the mainstream. Florence Griffith Joyner made headlines with her long, designed Olympian nails in 1988. And historians may credit the day when Bernadette Thompson cut and plastered real dollar bills on Lil Kim’s nails as the moment that our current fascination with nail art began. Those acrylics would eventually be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, and that nail style — long, tapered, excessively styled — can now be seen replicated across Instagram where nail artists like @britneytokyo and @chaunlegend showcase their work.
Where I’m from, the style is chunky acrylic, sanded to a blunt, square shape, shorter than the fashion today and painted a bright color—often pink, or a classic French tip, sometimes a French tip with color. Imagine that chunky French tip on the end of a curling iron, around the neck of a beer, or cupping the back pocket of Miss Me denim out in a pasture somewhere in rural Texas.
In her book of essays on self-delusion, “Trick Mirror,” author Jia Tolentino writes of the clarion call for women to optimize themselves: their bodies, their hair, their diets, their skin, and their nails. “The ideal woman can be whatever she wants to be,” she writes, so long as she is ideal to start with. But it must be said that the ideal woman isn’t real; she’s an amalgamation of the products and services she pays for. She is artificially made.
Staying on the beauty beat in The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, Tolentino describes Instagram Face, the new leading edge of womanly optimization, a “cyborgian face” aesthetic influenced by vaguely ethnic sensibilities and achieved through injectables. As a rule, most women with Instagram Face also possess the nails sets made popular by IF-havers like Kylie Jenner. And like current nail trends, Instagram Face is not subtle; its artificiality is in part its point, a signal that its possessor has both the means and the wherewithal to optimize, or perfect, themselves.
And like current nail trends, the embrace of artificiality inherent in Instagram Face is an admission of a striving toward perfection. To have Instagram Face and to have well-cared-for nails is to admit that you’re trying, to admit that you wish to be perfect. Nails are just more easily accessible to your average woman. At $40 plus tip, they are a gateway drug.
Once, I wanted to be a writer, worshipped for my words. Once, I thought I could be perfect by eating 1200 calories a day and maintaining a rigorous exercise schedule. I was really close to perfection then. At their most basic, nails are dead cells that we add pigment and plastic to. I pay $50 a month for the pleasure, which is way less than a mortgage, which I once thought I would have. (Cardi B pays $200+ per fill.) During the hour-long appointment, the manicurist holds my hand and chastises me for tensing it; she tells me many times to relax.
I used to have chipped nails and lots of plans for myself. I now know I cannot be whatever I want to be, but I can pay for the nails, which almost feels like the same thing as my teenage dreams coming true. They are the one beauty treatment that comes out like it did in pictures. No dieting, no work, no curling, primping, spraying, sucking in, or filtering. They are an expression of myself that comes out right; not even writing can do that.
When I started this essay, I was in the first blush of the thrall of nails. Now, getting them done once a month is an old habit and I need more to achieve that first high. I want fake eyelashes, those filler injections to make my chin more buff, and subtle lip plumpers. Maybe I’ll take up barre like Jia. Just the other day, I wandered into Hollywood Brows, a new brow outpost on Austin’s East Sixth Street. As I lay diagonally on a red-plush chair, Ariana Grande made me believe in the divine power of the feminine. I felt like god, in control. But when I left, my eyebrows were sharpie-black, thick and incongruous with my blonde hair. They didn’t look like the images posted throughout the salon, and they weren’t perfect. Not like nails.
Taylor Prewitt writes about women, culture, art, and whatever tickles her fancy in Texas. She is a former member of Homecoming Court and her boyfriend drives a 95 Ford Bronco. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter!
