Backstory: I started painting my nails top stop putting my fingers in my mouth

[type_wild]

The good: Since I started painting my nails, I HAVE reduced the amount of biting my cuticles

The bad: Since I started painting my nails and keeping them longer (because short nails + nail polish looks silly), I've been experienceing that previously unknown feminine ailment of "broken nails", culminating with today's fun which took a third of the nail off and bled like a pig and today is mealprep + hair washing day and this is inconvenient (but luckily not painful, at least not yet)

Conclusion: Long nails are bothersome and nail painting is time-consuming, but will hopefully be worth it if one day I either no longer have torn cuticles, or at least stop fixing them with my teeth

OTOH: Should Luka Couffaine, who I despise not because of the person he is portrayed as but because of the way he is written, count as a kindred spirit or not? He would share my suffering of the tediousness of nail painting, but as a guitarist he keeps his short and don't have to live with the fear of doing jumping jacks and catching a thumb on a shelf

Comments

[duskpeterson]

"because short nails + nail polish looks silly"

(*Checks Google Images for "painted nails".*) Interesting results. I expected the images to turn up 90% long nails, but it was actually more like 50% long, 50% short. None of this changes what *you* consider silly, of course. I'm just interested by this sea change in fashion.

[type_wild]

and would you believe that I actually DID google that way back when I started this project?

I still have Feelings about performative femininity and its frequent inconvenience and limitatiosn on women's movenent, and painting my nails in the first place was somewhat of a wall to climb.

the tl;dr would be that nail groomin is more than filing them, and my standards of "long" is pretty much "everything that isn't cut as short as it gets". The lessons learned is probably that making painted nails look good relies mostly on shaping them - which for my part is to not bring too much attention to the fact that I just apply the nail clipper whenever it's getting bothersome.

[duskpeterson]

My apprentice (who paints his nails and is also an artist) agrees with you about the importance of shaping. I agree with you about applying the clipper only when the nails are getting bothersome. :)

[type_wild]

Haha, it's good to have the wisdom of my seniors on the topic!