Feature: Power at your fingertips
By:
Kira Cochrane
At first, if I'm
honest, I fail to understand the link between the serpent costumes one models
is wearing and the trees being fashioned out of her hands. Her nails form long,
brown tree trunks, at the top of which sprout bright acrylic leaves. It takes
me 20 minutes to realize it's the creation story, Adam and Eve, depicted
entirely in nail art. Of course it is.
A crowd has gathered at
the Nailympics in London,
straining against a rope to watch some of the world's best nail technician’s
work against the clock in the fantasy competition. Success rests on the model's
look as a whole, and so there is a man, for instance, dressed as a leprechaun,
complete with large fake ears, warts and a crushed-velvet costume. There is a
woman dressed as a leopard, with wild animals attached to her nails: giraffe,
elephant, panda, parrot, and lion. A working water feature twines around one
model's waist, gushing towards her feet, causing a woman in front of me to rush
to the ladies. There is a heart-stopping moment when a model painted gold gets
one 10in-long nail caught in her hair, and struggles for a second, before
finally, perilously, extricating it.
A competitor from Italy
stops to tell me about her design. From left to right, a fable unfolds about a
woman who gets mixed up with an amorous werewolf, becomes a vampire, ends up in
a coffin, and is then saved by a handsome prince. The nails look heavy, but not
painfully so. In some cases the models appear to be buckling beneath the weight
of the designs. Head judge Elaine Watson tells
me later that on one score sheet, for an otherwise excellent effort, she noted
the technician should "give some consideration to the weight of their
work", she says, "because the poor girl couldn't even lift her
hands".
This is the eighth year
of the Nailympics, an event run by Scratch magazine editor
Alex Fox, in which nail technicians compete in categories including nail
embellishment, stiletto nails and soak-off gel manicure. There are 452
competitors, from 24 countries, with Moldova and Estonia taking part for the
first time. It's expensive to compete, with technicians having to pay an
entrance fee, plus travel and accommodation costs for themselves and their
models, but the event's popularity reflects the boggling success of nail art
right now. According to Euro monitor
International, global sales of nail polish increased 43%
between 2008 and 2011 – as sales of lip products grew just 7% and facial
makeup 11%.
Nail art was
the fashion sensation of the 2012 Olympics, with the Minx brand
creating flag designs for every nation's athletes, which was applied at nail
salons in the Olympic Park. Almost every time a female winner held up her
medal, some nail art seemed to flash up.
The current success of
the market is often attributed to affordability, but Fox mentions two other
familiar factors: fashion and
celebrity. "It probably started with London fashion week. Alexander
McQueen was one of the first designers who said: 'I want the nails done to go
with the hair and makeup. And now pretty much every show has nails backstage.
So the fashion world woke up to nails about seven years ago, and now it's just,
ka-boom!"
Since then, she says,
"you've had Rihanna, Katy Perry, Gaga, all those celebrities suddenly
wanting to put nail art on their fingers, and go crazy with their costumes …
We've had this explosion on the high street, and now we have nail bars popping
up everywhere."
Rihanna
– \Features
Watson, who has worked
as a nail technician in Los Angeles for almost two decades, says there has been
a cultural shift too. "Customers who were coming to me in America in 1994
brought their children, and put nail art on them. Those children are adults
now, with their own disposable income, so they have grown up around it, and its
gone mainstream."
Fellow judge Izayah
Jeffrey, from Palm Springs, California, feels the success is due to
nail art's limitless possibilities. Jeffrey is in his early 40s and has always
been an artist, but he first started painting nails eight years ago, after
meeting "the godfather of nails", the late Tom Holcomb, who became
his partner. "I was just intrigued, wanting to spend every moment with
him," he says. After six months as a nail technician, training under
Holcomb, he came to the first London Nailympics in 2005, entered three
competitions – mixed-media, tip overlay and silk wraps – and won them all,
becoming the grand champion of champions. The mixed media competition
involves 10 artificial fingertips, he explains, each a different size,
exhibited in a closed container, with at least three mediums used in their
decoration. His entry was inspired by The Phantom of the Opera – an
ornate, colourful masquerade ball. "One mask was the goddess of the stars,
one was the king of the universe – they each had deities and gods and goddesses
– doing this whimsical dance, going down a staircase, with a chandelier and then
a gauze of flowers made of acrylic roses."
Now, he says, if people
like a certain time period, say the 1950s or 60s, "they can have that
look, or if they like the hookers in the Victorian era, that whole bordello
look, they can have that. They live vicariously through their nails." He's
a big fan of marbling, particularly in colours that make nails resemble vintage
Pucci fabrics. Fox mentions a trend for felt nails, and designs made from lace.
UV-cured polishes – dried under a lamp, and exceptionally hardwearing – have
also transformed the industry, says Watson.
Ornate, painted, long,
embellished nails nonetheless still seem one of the least practical fashion
trends of all time. Professor
Aileen Ribeiro, author of facing Beauty: Painted Women and
Cosmetic Art, says long nails have been popular for centuries, partly because
they denote wealth and leisure. "People in the Ming dynasty had incredibly
long fingernails," she says, "and obviously this implied they really
couldn't do very much work at all. So it's about status, really. Leisurely
status. And long nails give out a lot of different signals. They elongate the
fingers, and for hundreds of years, long, slim fingers have been very much
admired. People [displayed] their hands much more in the past than we do today.
There was far more in the way of hand deportment, so a man would put his hands
within the buttons of his waistcoat to show off their elegance, and a woman
would use a fan."
Yet the vogue for nail
polish is surprisingly recent. Angus Trumble, senior
curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Centre for British Art, and
author of The Finger: A Handbook, says that in the 19th century, in European
cultures, "there were all sorts of nostrums and powders, products that
were designed to make nails look shiny, pink or fresh, youthful and smooth, but
they were generally used rather like shoe polish. So you put it on, and
polished it off, and it would leave a tint or a tinge." When women
polished their nails back then, says Ribeiro, "they buffed them with
chamois leather, or they put lightly colored beeswax on their nails to give
them a shine." It was a very natural look. So in the 1920s, when paints
developed for cars and aircraft began being applied to nails, many found them
startling.
The question critics
asked, says Ribeiro, is why women "with all these relative new freedoms,
having won the vote, and able to stride out, no longer hobbled by skirts, tight
whalebone corsets, and so on – why would they need to wear makeup and polish
their nails so much? I think what the complaint is, from critics – and they're
nearly always male critics – is that women are illogical. Long nails,
particularly when polished, give out the look of a kind of harpie, a woman who
is ferocious, and is almost prepared to be bloodthirsty in her quest for a
man. There's been quite a lot of discussion as to why red is so popular,
because it is the color of blood, it is the color of danger; it is the colour
of subversion. But of course it is just an enhanced and artificial way of
replicating the colour of one's lips." Early on in nail polish's
evolution, brands began selling matching lipstick and nail colour.
In the early days, too,
some were so suspicious of the trend they suggested it was a form of self-harm.
Trumble writes about lauded psychiatrist, Dr Karl A Menninger, who in 1934
"presented his case to the American Psychiatric Association that 'bobbed
hair and tinted nails' were a form of self-mutilation no less harmful than the
abnormal cutting off of an arm, or starving oneself to death". There were
also suggestions that nail polish must be a means of covering up sin or dirt.
Ribeiro says the trend might have been associated with
"an element of sluttishness, that if you paint your nails, you hide
dirt under the fingernails. Given the notion of health and hygiene, which was
so big in the early 20th century, this again would seem to be going a step
backwards. So I think there were a lot of quite complex feelings that
people had, which they may not have fully understood."
Nail polish was taken
up by Hollywood stars, with actors including Rita Hayworth popularizing red
nails in the 40s and 50s. In the 70s, artificial nails were invented, and in
that decade women in the African American community, and the African Caribbean
community in the UK, began pioneering brilliant new styles and ideas. Dr
Shirley Tate, author of Black Skins, Black Masks, says manicured nails were
always a way of showing class distinctions. "Certainly, in the Caribbean,
the people who used to have nails that were long and manicured were women who
didn't have to do housework. So having long nails that were manicured was a way
of showing class." If a woman couldn't afford a salon manicure, "you
did your own manicure every Sunday, because that was about middle-class
femininity, the aspiration for professional and middle-class life."
What's interesting,
says Tate, is how the meaning of different looks changes. "Now we have
dancehall artists with fake nails and loads of art on them, and that shows
a different version of femininity, maybe, than that middle-class one." Mainstream
culture has appropriated nail art in the same way as it has other black beauty
practices, including hair extensions, she says.
As the models in the
nail embellishment competition line up for the judging, I speak to them, and
some of the artists. The theme for this competition is the Olympics. A model
from Ostend in Belgium has designs painted in bright yellows and greens on her
natural nails, each showing a different Olympic sport – diving, football,
cycling, and weight lifting. David Ciaccio, from Rome, is wearing acrylic nails
painted blue, green and gold. Anita Podoba, a nail technician from Hungary,
says she has tried to capture the Olympic spirit of Ancient Greece, so her
design includes the Parthenon – as well as a nail depicting the Queen and James
Bond parachuting into the park, my favourite of the
whole competition.
Karishma Patel is a
professional hand model, working with the company Hired Hands, and while she
likes the design she is wearing – when she holds her nails together, they form
a union flag, picked out in crystals – she doesn't think she could wear
long nails every day. "You can just about push your hair back, but
you might scratch your eyes out – you'd be dangerous to yourself, and dangerous
to other people." Like all the nail models I meet, those blessed with
beautiful hands – the key is slender fingers, and long nail beds, apparently –
she prefers the natural look.
But there are many who
insist that long nails enhance the hand's beauty, and are perfectly easy to
work with. Olga Clapcott, a competitor from Bournemouth, has just created an
immensely intricate, involved design, based around the Olympic flame,
while sporting conical stiletto nails 4 cm long. Doesn't she find it tricky
to work with them on? On the contrary, she says; she finds everyday tasks
of all kinds much more difficult without them. "When I'm
typing," she says happily, "I can reach all the keys without moving
my hand."
Courtesy - The Guardian
