26. Gel Manicure
One of the hardest parts of growing older, aside from people you love dying and winter disappearing, is that the daily amount of time you spend on maintenance increases every year. To be 100 percent you soon need to start giving 110 percent. Eventually 110 percent only yields 90 percent results, so you up it, working harder, moisturizing more, adding fiber into meals where it doesn’t belong for the sake of your gut. God forbid, flossing. Soon, giving it your all gives such diminishing returns that being at only 70-85 percent starts to feel like good enough.
A glimpse into this phenomenon is available to anyone who has invested heavily in the trappings of femininity, which is largely about maintenance. Once you start doing any new thing to change your appearance, it will most likely require constant updates, like Zoom. You can give up a behaviour, like dying your hair for instance, but that means living through an awkward growing out stage where everyone can see how you’ve abandoned effort. Well-adjusted people can handle that, however I assume most of us are not well-adjusted.
I have fallen into the vanity/maintenance trap with a lot of things. I’m only saved from stuff like constantly getting my eyelashes filled in because femininity is uncomfortable to me. This is something I’ve tried very hard to correct because no matter how neutrally I dress I know I am perceived as a Woman with a capital W. I don’t hate being a woman, some things about it I love, but it feels like a costume for me most of the time and one that doesn’t look quite right in the mirror. I know what other people see, but what I see is a pigeon wearing peacock feathers when I get dressed up or wear makeup or put on jewelry.
Aside from this discordance, I’m also incredibly sloppy, clumsy, and inclined to sit in dirt. Most of my shirts have stains in the crevice between my breasts where food falls. I wear clothes until they’re threadbare, except for anything that needs dry cleaning which I’ll wear once and then forget exists because I’m not going to the dry cleaners for anyone. I like to dress as though I might have to hike over a mountain for safety at any moment, and that is not a mode made for fashion.
I’m trying to paint a picture without anyone accusing me of being a misogynist because we’re at a strange cultural place when it comes to feminism where suddenly it’s more important to seem supportive of Barbie than to support a local domestic violence center or something. It’s great that women are embracing femininity as a way to reclaim fun, identity, and cultural practices that were rejected in a reactionary way many decades ago, but horseshoe theory is very real. It’s kind of coming back around again to a place where not doing your makeup is unacceptable and it’s making me feel insane. This is a long preamble to saying I got a gel manicure (lol) for the first time, because it’s hard to explain why this was significant. It’s not, of course, but it was a strange experience for me for all the reasons above and it continued to be a strange experience as it grew out. It looked bad.
The place I picked is known for doing pretty cool designs and I wanted to choose something fun because it would last, but the communication wires got crossed and it just turned out a glossy pale pink. Oh well. I have had regular manicures in the past and there’s usually a lot of soaking and moisturising and oiling all over the cuticles. It’s a relaxing process. My gel manicurist did none of that. She grabbed a grinding tool and took away my cuticles with it entirely, until some were bleeding and they were all inflamed. It’s funny when you go to any kind of salon service, it’s very easy to just lose your voice. The person administering to you is doing something so intimate to your body and it feels like a huge thing for them to deign to do it at all, how dare you criticize them like some sort of Karen from hell? And if you’ve never had whatever the service is, you don’t even know what to expect because people don’t always discuss these things in careful detail. Like, we all go to the bathroom, but do we explain to each other how we wipe? And so my cuticles were stolen before I knew what was happening and then it was too late. I gritted my teeth and applied Neosporin when I got home.
A few other things I didn’t expect: how hot the little machine was frying the gel material into place on my nail. I kept thinking, there’s no way this doesn’t cause cancer. And I imagined all the people doing this on a regular basis, and the manicurist in front of me inhaling the fumes all day long as she cooked people’s fingers. There’s a lot of stuff we do that could be causing cancer in us right now, many of them out of our control, like drinking microplastics. I dye my hair a lot and it definitely doesn’t smell like not cancer when I do it. So we’re all just kind of choosing what risks to take for vanity or pleasure or obligation.
As my nails grew long, I did enjoy how falsely strong they felt. It was fun to clack them against stuff, vamping like Cruella De Vil for an imaginary audience. I do think gel manicures perfectly encapsulate what I started this story with, about how maintenance takes over more and more of our lives. The gel really fucks up your nails, especially if removed incorrectly, leaving them rough and splintered. So to maintain you have to go again and again or just reveal your battered fingers. That is what I did, picking them off like a little gremlin weeks after I should have had them professionally soaked off, flicking the opal shells under a table as I chatted with friends over drinks. Then I cut them short again, the tips of my fingers tender after being shielded from the world for almost a month.
Choose what you invest in wisely and make sure to ask yourself if you can do it over and over. Because that’s life, baby.
Should have gone for something like this:
A lot of the new stuff I have done is stuff like this, where I can just go pay to get a treatment, and I think I’ve done most of the big ones if anyone has more obscure stuff to suggest.
Or a good manicurist, I think I could gel up again for a special occasion. Anyone getting married soon?