A nail salon now has more options than a German SUV.
When one of my teen daughters got a manicure this summer, she’d return home and proudly display the handiwork; palms down, fingers splayed, 10 little pieces of appendage art. I’d say it looked fantastic, even though I had no clue if the fingernail session involved gel, acrylic, powder, glitter, blobbing, sandblasting, fracking. Her nails were now white and red. Or aquamarine. Or speckled primrose. Or metallic cerulean. That’s all I could vaguely detect.
Now I exhale with relief knowing those coloured nails were not racist!
I never want to beat up on a public broadcaster. But this week, the BBC got into soup when it published an unforced error: “Classy or classist? How bare nails became a hot issue.”
If you missed the hot take, you’re out in the cold. An update now runs below the headline: “This article has been removed pending editorial review.”
Too late for that, BBC. As measured in social media posts and headlines, the blowback was as quick as press-on nails: “No, BBC. Bare Nails Are Not Racist.” “BBC Roasted For Linking Unpainted Fingernails To ‘White Supremacy’ In Woke Article.” “The BBC Declares Plain Manicures Are Virulently Racist.”
A couple of quotes from cultural experts in the now mothballed story riled up the commentariat. Bare nails, said one, “really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities.”
Bare nails “are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty.”
I think we can agree this is beyond silly. I have many female friends, some with painted nails, some au naturel. The reason for not having glam digits is usually practical. Maybe she is a doctor. Or she gardens. She has a newborn. She refuses to blow $90 every two months on her fingertips.
Any aversion to Revlon is not an endorsement of David Duke.
Now, if I glance down at a woman’s fingernails and see 10 swastikas or silhouettes of Stephen Miller’s face, fine, she’s a bigot.
But how can not doing anything to your fingernails be racist?
The far-left needs to visit a common sense salon. AOC recently framed “Woke 1” as a “crazy” era. It was indeed. It was crazy to hear the charge of “cultural appropriation” levelled against someone who wore a bedazzled blouse or opened a taco food truck. “Racism” was slapped on hiking, algebra, classical music, Western medicine, sleep, reading …
I have never had a manicure, though my wife and daughters have suggested a pedicure might not be a bad idea. I’ve never applied a decorative substance to my keratin plates, not unless you include an accidental fleck of Liquid Paper as I corrected a school essay on UFOs.
But I’m hard-pressed to understand how not painting your fingernails is classist or racist. That’s like telling a man that shaving is discriminatory. Or that parting his hair on the right is xenophobic. Have we reached a point in the timeline when plain fingernails can get you hauled into HR? In what deranged taxonomy of trendy esthetics can unpainted fingernails be correlated with racial bias?
Are hoop earrings a signal you believe in circular oppression?
If anything, the dizzying options at nail salons is the real classism. I was picking up a suit at the dry-cleaner the other day and the woman who worked there had bubbles on her nails that contained floating rhinestones or some such. This young woman put more effort into her fingernails than I devote to my internal organs.
This is the real problem.
Big Cosmetics should not be pressuring women to treat their fingertips like Fabergé eggs. We should be celebrating plain nails. I respect women who clip and file. It’s a flex. It telegraphs confidence. It is a “thanks, no thanks” to the beauty industrial complex. If there is a woman in my car with unpainted nails, I know she could help push the vehicle should we run out of gas. There can no pushing with kitten heels and rhinestone bubbles.
Can we please stop calling everything “racist?” It’s an injustice to real racism. Getting denied a rental apartment due to the colour of your skin is racism. Ice cream is not racism. You don’t need a decoder ring to know fingernails — polished or plain — have nothing to do with discrimination.
Woke 1 helped put a real racist in the White House twice. Enough already.
Sometimes, a fingernail is just a fingernail.
Now, where should I get this pedicure and how much will it cost?
