Hands, mine.
I recall having once read a quote from some no longer relevant “It”-girl?which one, I cannot say for sure?about how you can look as disheveled as you want as long as your nails are well-manicured. “Good advice,” I thought to myself, as an individual who for some reason is incapable of making the distinction between looking artfully unkempt and looking downright slovenly.
Good advice though it is, I’ve never quite been able to follow through on it. I hate sitting still for manicures, hate making the time to get manicures, hate waiting for my nails to dry, hate the way they look once they’ve chipped, and hate how seriously I question my fine motor skills when my hands jerk around as I’m trying to paint them myself. It’s all a disaster, which is why I’ve long settled into a comfortable, if not exactly polished, routine of keeping my nails short, clean, and bare. The normcore of nails, essentially. But on a recent stroll through the beauty aisles of the Rite Aid right next to my subway stop, which is my idea of sport, I made what I at the time believed would be a regrettable purchase: artificial nails.
Not celebrity-approved “nail wraps.” Not even the over-designed, bedazzled ones that are, like, so tacky they could actually be kind of cool if only Sarah Snyder or some other Instagram fashion teen would make them happen again. Just straight up, glue-on artificial nails in a glossy mint green, which ...