Among the thousand tiny, unimportant details about myself that I have not previously shared in the blogosphere is this tidbit: parts of me are not real.
I'm talking nails, people. Please. Waaay too frugal to revamp the big stuff. Not that the big stuff needs revamping, thank you very much - but I have long felt a conviction to keep as true to the original model as possible. That is, until I discovered acrylic nails. And highlighting.
Yesterday being a school/work holiday, I marked the occasion by taking Third Grader to the nail salon with me. Normally I avoid taking either of them with me, but I made a horrible mistake three weeks ago and allowed the nail salon to take off my acrylic nails. I was desperate to restore my hands to a condition that didn't call for balling them into fists all day long, so I chanced it.
I don't know what possessed me to let them take the damn things off in the first place. I have been doing this to my nails since I discovered it could be done, something like 17 years ago. Discovering acrylic nails felt something like how I imagine it felt to discover fire. Nothing short of miraculous, really. My real nails are the thickness and consistency of onion skin. Hot water makes them hurt. A strong wind makes them hurt. They peel and crack and generally make my hands look like they have recently been mauled. Once I learned that I could make them look like normal women's hands by letting someone shape tiny piles of smelly goo into hard and shiny coatings, I never looked back.
That is, until my dishwasher broke a few months ago, and I had to resort to manually washing dishes. Not good for acrylic. So not good that, when I went for a maintenance visit three weeks ago, the tech insisted on stripping me of my tiny armors altogether. I still haven't gotten my dishwasher fixed, so I am still manually washing dishes, and I believe I have mentioned that hot water FREAKING HURTS my pathetically weak natural "nails"- more like jagged ovals of skin, with triple the nerve endings. I had to go back. I just had to.
So while I was sitting there, watching the tech restore womanhood to my fingers (while Third Grader got herself a mini mani with blue polish), I got to thinking about the ridiculousness of it. Paying money to get fake nails so I can feel real. I caught my reflection in a mirror, particularly noticing the ultra blondeness of my highlighted hair. My naturally blonde hair. Fake blonde highlights in naturally blonde hair. What is this madness?
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I just thought I'd mention it. Women are crazy, don't you think? Then again, there's Third Grader - sitting there with her clip-in purple hair extensions, getting her nails painted blue. She may be on to something, no?
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4 comments:
Yeah, we're crazy. I dye my hair it's natural color just to get rid of a few stray gray hairs. I can easily count off the top of my head, 5 different skin regimens in my medicine cabinet--none of them make me look 20 anymore, but I keep trying...
I tried acrylic nails once, but I kept poking myself in the eyeball when I tried to deal with my contacts.
Spectacular does not begin to describe.
I also get highlights in my blonde hair. 2 different colors of blond highlights, actually :)
I tried fake nails way back in the day when I did hair and nails for a living. Hated them. But my real nails are pretty good, so if they were like onion skins, I might reconsider ;)
You should try taking some biotin for your nails. It's a B vitamin, but there's hardly any of it in a normal multi-vitamin. I started taking 600 mcg a day because my hair was weirdly fragile for a while, and it helped with that, but what I really noticed was that my nails started growing like crazy. They've never been particularly weak, so I don't know if biotin would help with that, but it might be worth a try.
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