Pros and cons: glittery tips

Sigh. My fingernails are stubs once again. It's the time in their cycle when they have all just broken and cling to my fingertips in tiny ragged squares. My nails just aren't strong enough to take the kind of abuse I do at work: water, chemicals, repeated hand-washing. They look fantastic when they grow beyond my fingertips and I polish them. For about a week they will stay long enough to give a good scratch and pretty enough to look like real fingernails. And then they break again.

So lately I have been dreaming about fake nails. Acrylics, tips, press-ons, whatever, I'm sure they will look a lot nicer than the sad little hangnailed stubs I have right now. I want nails that will always be long and shiny and have pink glittery tips and maybe even rhinestone accents. There's something delightfully fun and tacky about having glitter embedded in your (false) fingernails. On a date a few weeks ago, my potential boyfriend commented that he was glad I didn't sport press-on nails. Apparently he objected to the aforementioned tackiness. There is, I informed him, a BIG difference between artfully sculpted acrylic nails and $2.99 plastic press-on nails. One should not confuse the two. Had he made this distinction, his previous date may not have taken her fake nails and hit the highway. I would of course get the proper kind, not press-on. I admit that it's my vanity at the center of this issue, but there's also a practical point to this: they help my work. I could turn my shampoos (which already include moan-inducing head massages) into a shivery scratchdown that would curl my clients' toes. And part hair quickly and efficiently by skating my pinky nail along the scalp. Plus my nails wouldn't peel and break from being waterlogged all the time.

However, I have a few reservations. Maintenance. Who wants to add yet another ritual to the beauty process of dyeing, tweezing, cosmeticking and styling? And if I can't be bothered to get a bikini wax on a regular basis, would I really feel like getting a fill every four weeks? Then again nobody is checking me out below the belt right now, and people look at my hands every day. Regardless of maintenance, though, getting artificial nails is quite a process. Priming to rough up the surface of the nail, application of powder and liquid copolymer, curing, filing and polishing. That's a lot of time spent doing jack shit while getting your nails done. Lady of leisure indeed!

Of course investing in false fingernails is a far different process today than it was fifty years ago. In the 1930s when acrylic polymers were just beginning to be used for artificial nails, MMA (methyl methacrylate) could not only cause cancer and lung disease, the substance hardened to such a degree that it was literally unbreakable. If a client caught her fingernail in a compromised position, instead of snapping off at the point of stress, it would likely rip her real nail off as well. Ugh. It's that stomach-twisting image of girls who have broken artificial nails deep into their own nail beds that gives me pause. Or my classmate in beauty school who had a spot of fungus underneath her acrylics that needed to be drilled out. What am I thinking???

Oh right. Pink glitter.