This month is my birthday month, so the focus is going to be something I am so all about: nails.
Sometime between 2006-ish, when I was still scared of the makeup aisle and spent evenings pretending I wasn’t following white rabbit hyperlinks about drag, false lashes, makeup and hair falls to the summer of 2009 when I started painting my nails about once a week (though I didn’t start doing it regularly each week for a while), I got over it. “It” being my gender presentation and self-perception. Which is so complicated and all I want to do is explain why getting my nails did is so important to me. Like, Jo’s hair in Little Women important. It’s the thing I’m vain about.
Anyway. I like bling. I like shiny things and the LA look and the crumbs of makeup that I still carried from the mandatory girl-kit of my late teens included a pair of silver false lashes. This month is about nails, not lashes, I know, stay with me. Lashes and nail polish both are something that complete a character, when you’re acting or in an editorial. They’re more decidedly costume and they can be fabulous. And I figured out I could do fabulous. That wasn’t girly, when I still cared about if something was girly, it was just fancy.
I literally dipped my finger into painting my nails. I used to use a little mobile internet thing and grew out the nail on my index finger a bit so I didn’t have to use the stylus. The rest of my nails I kept very short. I started painting just the longer nail, for strength and because it was fancy. Sometimes I would do them up a little more for events.
Early summer 2009 Chase and I were in a new apartment, a place with no memory of former roommates, I was figuring some stuff out myself and part of that was a style direction that sort of wove the sunshine fashion of 1980s Miami with the rather sick street looks of LA. I found a blog called The Boobs (now over at The Boobs LA) that would post image dumps of hella nails did, with 3D pieces and sick bling. A couple months later, I was already starting to amass a collection of polish. It helps that Chase is a total enabler.
And now, almost two years later, I’ve been doing my nails every week. I’ve grown them out crazy long on my non-dominant hand, learned to square a femme habit with the rest of me and fallen in love with the tiny canvases that adorn my hands. I have dozens of nail polish colours, an airbrush and a legit obsession. My nails may now be trimmed down now for boxing, but they’re still fab.
So. This month I’m focusing just on the thing that I think I love the most. I want to do at least four different sets of art nails on acrylic tips and get shots of them, like extreme versions of ones I’ve done for friends.
I have a nerdy thing I do where I screenshot nails in a film and then try to replicate them. I’ve already done Ginger’s nails in Casino and I’ve got a file of stills of Nomi’s nails in Showgirls that I need to delve into. Any tips as to other notable movie nails would be awesome.
Other than that it’s kind of up in the air. It’s gonna rock. Local friends who’ve been wanting their nails did should shoot me a line for surely.
Now for the kind of impressive grid o’ nails did from my Flickr:
