I’m in a Committed Relationship With My Nail Tech
After an existentially challenging birthday “celebration” last December, I decided to donate a sh*t ton of old clothes, re-bleach my outgrown eyebrows, and chop almost all of my hair off in one swift kick of willpower. In the pandemic era, birthdays come and go with a heaping pile of conflicting feelings attached for me; nostalgia of what a birthday party once was and could’ve been, anxiety for the year to come, and longing for the years of normalcy before. At my core, I’ve always been the type of person to “do something big” as each year passes by, and for a long while, a trip around the sun would likely equate to a sparkly new piercing, a hard-to-cover and spontaneous tattoo, or some other inconspicuous body-mod to convince me of inner progression. If the outside changes, the inside will follow, and I’ll just keep growing gracefully with age.
Beyond my usual manic appearance shift tendencies (blue dye one week, sharp curtain bangs or a shag cut the next), my most recent annual identity shift took somewhere around 10 inches of hair off my head and left me with a micro-mullet — bangs and all. And so, entering into my 22nd year, I brought with me a multitude of Lady Di, Robert Pattinson, Tinkerbell, and Machine Gun Kelly references, as well as a lingering gender expression and sexuality crisis. Around a month ago, I stepped back and realized that as soon as I cut my hair, I felt a slow-developing question mark creeping up on my mind and almost immediately began implementing, arguably small, but so undeniably noticeable changes in my outward feminine presentation. I'm now on my fourth consecutive acrylic nail set this calendar year, I wear some rendition of a color-coordinated makeup look nearly every day, and have even opted for a more fragile, airy perfume.
I feel like my lack of hair has sucked me into a reversion of self. I’m creeping back into older, more hetero habits of mine and presenting as hyper-femme—a major shift for myself as a bisexual cis woman who only about a year ago went through a heavy identity and fashion crisis that parelelled my coming to terms with being gay. No harm in wearing a skirt or two, but a dip of the toes into my old drinking water now feels like walking on a slow-burning tightrope. Caught between androgyny and femininity, I burn. And the tip of the cigar singes the worst for me at the nail salon.
Photographed by Talia Smith
I’ll give a well-deserved shoutout to my girl Tweety, the nail tech who has swindled me into a routined residency at the shop that conveniently sits around the corner from my apartment. As much as I love Tweety, her gossipy coworkers, and the homey ambience of Allston Nails, I can’t help but stare into those oversized mirrors that consume its rented walls and hate what’s looking back to me for these three reasons: 1. Tweety definitely does not know I'm gay, 2. I feel straight as hell whenever I go to her, and 3. I am absolutely dumbfounded by the number of comments I've gotten about my nails—from far too comfortable friends and family—now being the "least gay thing about me."
Not to beat the untamable horse that is bi erasure into the ground, but I am 100% irrevocably over the idea that a feminine-presenting bisexual woman is just a straight girl in disguise, and if she looks like a girly-girl, she’ll only want a manly-man to satisfy her. Yes, my chosen sets are nearly 2 inches long, coffin-shaped, and femme. But they’re also adorned with edgy, sexy, and far-from-straight-girl Pinterest-inspired designs. Not that it really means anything to my point of erasure, but my current set accounts for 16 gems (half black, half white) and two fingers full of miniature white and black eyeballs; the rest long, nude, sharp, gay, and hot. I’m obsessed with them, the same way I was obsessed with my last set, with the red corner-to-corner tips and cute little black slithering snake (in retrospect, it did look like sperm). Long story short, I f*cking love my nails—I just can’t help but be a bit frustrated at the idea that an acrylic layer of product and minimal slab of paint on my fingers immediately makes it “impossible” for me to be intimate with anyone who has a vagina.
But I know it’s all not true, that I’m still as queer as I was before falling into a comitted relationship with my nail tech. Being the butt-end of a joke that brings my presentation to the forefront and questions it makes me want to rip off my entire set (no matter how horribly it would hurt and how torn my nail beds would remain). As lighthearted as the jokes about my de-yassification might be, they do most of the leg work in forcing me to continually reevaluate myself: how I'm presenting, why I'm doing the things I'm doing when I dress myself, and what I’m trying to show the world.
Alas, no one is screaming slurs in my face, I’m not experiencing debilitating dysphoria surrounding my gender, and I am very much capable of buying a bottle of acetone to remove my ever-femme claws. It can be so, so much admittedly worse than what it is, and I righteously acknowledge that. But my biggest issue—the one that’s bringing me to pour these feelings to the page—is that I don’t want to be seen as someone I’m not. I’m here, I’m queer, and I love my long nails. To me, that doesn’t seem too hard to get on board with. If I want to grasp for femininity to compensate for my short, gay haircut, just let me do it! I still love women, claws and all.
Yes, my nails, my jewelry, and my makeup do make me feel cute. But my silly little feminine touches never fall short of reminding me that I am constantly in flux with my style and expression as it aligns with my sexuality. Maybe this is more of a story about me hyper-analyzing the way I’m being perceived, or thinking too far into how pink my wardrobe palette is becoming. Maybe I’m just trying to hold onto whatever heteronormativity, and therefore, femininity, I have left in me. Maybe I’ll realize down the line that none of this really matters to me in comparison to everything else I could be worrying about. In the meantime, I’ll be with Tweety, talking sh*t about all of you—reaching for compensation, searching for a balance, and convincing myself that I owe the world androgyny—all while getting the hottest set of nails you’ve seen this side of Allston.