Beyond The Nail
Friday night, 1984. A young director tries to come up with a gimmick that will sear the horror of his latest creation onto the minds of America's teenagers and make them 'never sleep again'. Simultaneously Susie (we'll call her Susie Mark 9) looks for something to give her the edge over her coevals in snaring a shag. The both come up with the same idea, really really long nails.
Our director, Wes Craven, thought that Freddy Kruger's claws reflected a 'primal fear', which begs the question of whether boys with manicured mothers get a double anxiety attack. But maybe long nails counteract Oedipal desires, you don't want mummy stroking your face if you think your going to lose an eye.
Personally I've never liked the idea of a piece of gnarled keratin (the same protein that hooves are made of) caressing my brow, but ladies (and lads) are not close to letting go of the long-nail. The nail industry is worth over $6 Billion per year in the US alone. You can have it all filing, clipping, hardening, softening, piercing, embedded jewels. More brutal than backcombing, more impractical than stilettos and tackier than a spray-tan I've always been at a loss as to the fingernail as a perpetual favourite for beautification. But then what do I know? Susie mark 9 has the weight of history on her side. There's a reason why nails have been more enduring than lead make-up or wigs with ships in them, they’re on, they are the original gangster of beauty treatments.
I like to think that Susie Mark 1 also used talons to attract a mate. If cave-girls used piercing nails to defend against sabre-tooth tigers then to my mind, nails were perhaps phallus substitutes, not dissimilar to antlers. As much as I like this theory (which I’ve held since last week) it’s full of holes. Not least that it would mean that the nail would have been made obsolete by that masterpiece of prehistoric technology, the pointed stick. The stick meant less chance of goring when going claw to claw with sabre-tooths and less chance of nosebleeds when going finger to nose with yourself.
But if the pointed stick put pay to the humble nails’ use-function it was the start of their aesthetic dominance. Wikipedia, that bastion of knowledge, can’t make up its mind whether to date manicures back to 4000 or 6000 BC. Before I lambaste Wikipedia I should say that some eagle-eyed editor has removed my cave-man weapon thesis within 45 minutes of my posting it. The rather more reliable Encyclopedia Britannica says that 'manicure equipment was common in Late Bronze
and Early Iron Age graves' which is still well over 1000 years before a very different type of nails shot to the forefront of the popular imagination. That makes the humble manicure older than several other key features of our lives: English, democracy and, by some reckonings, God.
The fact is that long nails are unnatural. True, they grow naturally. But anyone who has ever ripped a nail off, or even separated a nail from its bed (second only to the paper-cut as the most pathetic but painful injuries), can attest that no body part that small should hurt that much. You don't see baboons mincing around with four-inch finger-knives. Even those jungle denizens who are as often red in claw as in tooth (lions, tigers, Hugh Jackman) have retractable talons and those stuck with fixed claws (bears, crocodiles) at least have to climb trees or muddy-banks. Animal nails mean business. Human nails don’t. Long nails mean you don't have to do anything that would risk ripping or chipping your fragile fingertips. Really really long nails means you don’t have to do anything that would risk ripping or chipping your tenderer parts with your own nails.
This fetish of the non-use is not just an icon of perennially lazy Western civilization. The Dowager empress of China kept long (Kruger Long) nails to denote her high status, a pointed reminder of what she didn't have to do. More recent incarnations of the long nail, artificial or natural, marries this lack of function with an aesthetic aspect. Lets face it, status symbols they may be, but the dowager empresses' weird claws were pretty rank. You wouldn't see the Princess Royal rocking them (Camilla Parker Bowles is another matter). In the late Nineteenth Century the use of artificial nails to cover real ones became a means of making one's nails, and oneself, look healthy - unhealthy nails can be an indicator of everything from cancer to cirrhosis. However, as with most definitions of corporeal beauty, the twentieth century moved from a vision of the natural as healthy to a sense of health and beauty where the body is toned, enlarged and adorned way beyond what most consider ‘natural’. Stylised nails stand within that spectrum of body modification somewhere above hair-straightening and the Schwarzenegger-six-pack and below cock-piercing and augmented mammary glands.
Home and Away’s Marilynn remarked that nails are ‘jewels not tools’. Given that her marriage to Mr. Fisher essentially made her the dowager empress of Summer Bay, her words are a useful indicator of the modern nail’s status. Within a hundred years fake and stylised nails (and I am talking about techniques beyond conventional nail varnishing) have moved from a cover-up tool for syphilitic courtesan Susie Mark 7 to a celebrity luxury, to the norm. Virginia Postrel notes that previously ‘Cher got her nails done, the rest of us did not’. Paralleling cosmetic surgery, there has been a democratization of both practitioners and adherents to nail modification - through Cher via Marilyn to the ubiquity of nail-salons saturating East London today.
Given the originality, technique and imagination that goes into nail design it would be churlish not to admit that it constitutes a fully fledged form of body-art that can be compared to a (less permanent) tattoo. Depending on how they are presented, and your own predilections, stylised, long or artificial nails lurch between glam, gaudy and gory. There’s also something sinister about a form of beauty treatment where manicurists’ hands are themselves scarred by the industrial-strength chemicals they use to give others delightful digits.
A month ago my girlfriend got some ‘squoval’ nails glued on. They looked amazing. And despite having difficulties opening cans, typing and using the toilet, she was able to pick her guitar better. I thought that in balance they were ok. I did, that is, until last night, when I rolled over on them (cracking two in the process) and woke up convinced that I was being disemboweled by a dream-agglomeration of my mother, Freddy, Struwwelpeter and Cher. I’m unconvinced about nail extensions, but Susie Mark 10 thinks otherwise.
Text by Sam Solnick
Photographs by Anna Stephens
