When I think of people I love, I often see their hands. My mother’s slim hands with the family rings that swing a little loose and the little finger that doesn’t go all the way straight. One friend’s hands with round small curves of nails. Another friend’s with nails filed a square. My sister’s are delicate and lined with a row of colorful rings. My husband’s huge, strong hands with a thumb carved at an angle from a table saw. My aunt’s and my father’s hands, like mine: broad and strong with some freckles and spots.
I suppose every part of us, is uniquely ours. But hands, perhaps since we see them and use them all the time, feel particularly personal. Like fingerprints, we all have them but none are the same.
I’ve written about hands often: how to take care of them, how to rewild them and how they can support us.
What I’m interested in here, though, is how specific we are culturally about what’s appropriate in how we care for our hands, grow or cut our nails and whether or not we color them.
Hand and nail care has been around since at least 3000 BC. The practices of manicures and pedicures have always been rooted in classism and racism. For example, in ancient cultures, only noble classes could wear red and black on their nails while working class could wear only pastels. And in our time, as Funmi Fetto wrote in The Guardian:
Black women have been repeatedly stigmatised for nail art. For example, …the American three-time gold-winning Olympic athlete Florence Griffith Joyner, whose record as the world’s fastest woman still stands, found her achievements constantly overshadowed by the media’s obsession with – and covert repulsion at – her jewelled acrylic nails. And yet, in 2020, it is Kylie Jenner who is routinely credited and celebrated for the trend.
In addition to the privilege attached to how we present our hands and nails, the practices are also highly gendered.
For years, I thought it was only appropriate to wear rings on my ring fingers (as my mother and grandmother did). I now wear a variety of rings on all different fingers and it feels oddly radical. I have played around with artificial nails and keeping my nails both short and long, polishing them and not. I see my nails like a kind of jewelry or accessory and I recognize what I’m doing falls neatly into the cultural, gendered paradigm.
The wearing of rings and long or polished nails is largely seen as a feminine style and men or male-presenting folks who break this code can get real push-back. When a young gay male friend started getting long, brightly colored artificial nails, it caused a surprising kerfuffle – particularly with other men. Why would something so small and ostensibly innocuous garner such strong reactions?
Similarly for painted toes.
Lately, I’ve been questioning the choices I make around my hands and asking myself why I do what I do. Given how personal and how public hands are, those choices feel like strong, expressive statements – and I’m interested in making them with awareness.