Love Me, Love My Aspirationails

Why I’m Back on the Acrylic Train & Have No Plans to Get Off

Earlier this month, I went for breakfast with an acquaintance who manages the PR for a mid-range lifestyle brand based here in London. Halfway through the breakie, she turned her attention to my hands and complimented me on how elegant my nails looked. I’d just cut them down for the first time in a year or so, for a project that I was working on and they were painted a pretty opalescent tone. However, there was to be a swift sting as she rounded out the praise with a comparison to, “those tacky plastic ones everyone is getting these days.” Now I absolutely understand this may seem incredibly trivial and not something that could ruffle a single feather. So, what? It’s just nails, right? Get a grip. I know that she wasn’t trying to jellyfish me; she genuinely didn't realise that I generally sport turbo talons. I’m sure she just thought she was preaching to the choir. But for my many sins, it was something which piqued my sensibilities, because I am, you see, a serious nail person.

Us nail people live in plain sight, taking on the appearance of regular members of society who make logical and reasonable choices. But in truth, we do not make decisions this way. Instead, we spend silly money and precious hours we will never get back on ten 1cm squares of keratin which last, at most, two to three weeks. At times I have almost bankrupted myself over my nails (actually one of the cover lines on my mock-up cover of Grazia the day I left). I have prioritised my manis over my bus pass, a new winter coat, a well-rounded diet. I absolutely understand that it is certifiable. Yet, I know I will never change, it just runs too deep. Without my nails I feel naked and debased. I am my nails, and my nails are me.

‘True Story: I Blew £50k on Shellac Last Year’, Grazia January 2015 (*some hyperbole involved)

I first became aware of my nails when I was 8 or 9. My nanny Audrey who helped raise my brother and me wasn’t a glamourpuss, but she was very aware of what was and what wasn’t proper. She always had well-kept nails and I remember her looking at my peeling nail plates and immediately using a hardener on them. That weekend she sent me home with a little bottle (she often returned me back to mum with beauty remedies for the flaws she had noticed. Unfortunately, she said, there wasn’t anything she could do for a big nose) and told me to paint it on to keep them strong and well-groomed.

My mum and brother were horrendous nail-biters, but I worked hard at my nails, using the hardener and rubbing my cuticles with olive oil every evening. From an early age, I noticed if other women’s’ cuticles were unkempt and judged that they must not be proper, because that was how I’d been schooled. By the time I was in my late teens, I had started to spend my paper round and Sainsbury’s money on my nails. Mum and I would go to a salon in Welling, in southeast London on the boundary with Kent. As a dedicated garage girl and influenced by Tanya Turner from Footballer’s Wives, I would get acrylic white square tips and for some reason, my otherwise strict school, said nothing about them. Acrylics have always been my friend as my nails are naturally weak and turn to dust beneath any varnish, including Shellac. I’ve never had a regular mani that didn’t chip after 24 hours, and I have had hundreds. Through sixth form, my tips became my thing. I loved the tap tap tap sound they made on the supermarket tills as I typed the buttons for weighed goods. I loved how they looked on a Friday night dressed up with my Morgan de Toi going out top and the Moschino jeans I’d worked three nights stacking shelves for. I loved what they said about me—that I was pulled together and grown up and I was going somewhere in life. They were my aspirationails.

However, within a day of arriving at University in Edinburgh, I realized that my nails weren’t deemed by all to be quite so proper. Dropped into an incredibly non-diverse public-school graveyard of toffs, where people referred to cab drivers as Jeeves and perfume as scent, I was completely at sea. Along with many other elements of my being, my nails were openly derided, and I can remember feeling ashamed. I soon learnt that actually proper nails were natural and buffed, or short and painted exclusively in a specific nude tone (to look ‘clean’). If one were slightly bolder style-wise, they could be red (letterbox for summer, claret for winter). Anything which diverted from this narrow slither of the rainbow was naff and certainly non-U.

While it may seem incredibly old-fashioned to anyone who has glimpsed even three seconds of a Tik Tok video, this kind of judgement continues to prevail far more than your Instagram feed might suggest. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand completely that certain styles of anything can be associated with luxury. There are always going to be semiotics which are perceived to be upscale by those who have the power to set the agenda. Re-creating those signifiers on a modest budget is what I have been doing as a living for the past 20 years.

My beef is more that I really believed the world had turned on this granular level of propriety. With the resurgence of acrylics and the influence of Black culture having such a huge impact on beauty aesthetics, the idea that longer, or artificial nails are fundamentally un-chic is out of step with our more egalitarian times. While arguments over cultural appropriation within beauty are understandably rife (read more here and here), the ubiquity of bedazzled, sculpted, brightly coloured fingernails within mainstream beauty has upended the rulebook. The idea that only middle-class white girl, French-inspired, hoity toity nails are acceptable feels dated. The church of chic has become much broader, people hailing from many more backgrounds have secured the reins. Moreover, originality, a sense of fun and excitement about your identity, with a subtle strain of rebellion on the side are all things now deemed inherently stylish, at least by our Gen-Z successors. You’re certainly not finding any of those at the end of a bottle of Bubble Bath (a very nice pinky nude by O.P.I, in case you were in the market).

If you have ever sat at a nail bar squirming under the pressure to choose a polish colour, it’s because rather than a triviality, nails can actually mean a lot. Nails are class, race, self-expression, acceptance, and exclusion. They are a certain kind of code, especially amongst women—and I say this as one who has, in the past, judged others for being slatternly with their grooming. There are nails which, for a certain kind of puritan, are seen to be professional; others which are only on point for holidays. Glitter is fine in December, my favourite Lincoln Park After Dark (also O.P.I) is appropriate for Halloween. Other than that? Quelle horreur. Stepping a pedicured toe outside of these rules can justly provoke anxiety. That angst is why I’ve watched a fully grown woman change a shade of nude Shellac four times. It’s why I have a friend who once took so long to choose a polish on a double nail date, I had to get a pedi and a lash tint while I was waiting. And let’s not even open to the door to shape–almond, oval, square, square round, coffin, stiletto—or the dizzying array of art now more widely available. The choices can be totally paralysing when the result could potentially condemn you to 14 days of pejorative social judgement.

When it comes to my nails, aside from Tanya Turner, my personal influences have always stemmed from glamorous Jewish women on screen. Think Dorien Green from Birds of a Feather or Janice Hosenstein from Friends. Both are also prolific leopard print wearers and are seen as arbiters of bad taste. Somewhere along the line, blinded by their moxie, I missed that memo. Instead of vulgar, long nails represent to me self-care, discipline, power and, to borrow a Yiddish phrase, chutzpah. While long nails might be associated with sexual deviance or seduction, from my experience, most men are not big fans, though I like the idea of the long-taloned gentleman-eater, ready to scoop them up and spit them out. I wish I’d been more like that in my youth.

After bowing to convention and clipping my nails short through my 20s and 30s, in recent years I’ve started to wear my acrylics again, because they make me feel most like myself. They connect me with the person who existed before other people’s opinions left their mark and give me an opportunity to flash some rebellious spirit, even if I’m dressed in the personality erasing school-run uniform of jeans and Breton. They let everyone know there is a hinterland beneath the surface. They are once again aspirationails, at least in my eyes.

They are not however, the most convenient accoutrement with two young children. Try doing up the poppers on a sleepsuit or getting a buggy board off with inch-long pieces of plastic attached to your nail bed. Or taking your contacts out. You also can’t get them done everywhere, with lots of salons hoping to elevate themselves from the hoi polloi by ensuring they are firmly off the menu. It is a highly skilled job and not every technician even knows how to take them off. Travelling in Europe? Forget about infills. But the fact that they are such a ballache makes me love them even more. They aren’t for everybody, but they are for me. Either way, no matter the pearl clutching at my claws, I’m not going to be giving up on them any time soon. I am of the opinion that chic is as chic does. While I may trim them down for a shoot, no-one is ever going to make me feel embarrassed of them again. Love me, love my gloriously inconvenient, moderately flashy, seriously high maintenance nails. Now, could you possibly help me? I’m having some problems with this circular flush.