Nails
Ever since my teen years I had always have long nails. I would take utmost care of my nails. I would shape and file them every week. I would keep my nails clean. I would always ensure that my nails are blunt, so that they would not scratch or hurt anybody. Yet an incident occurred that led me think otherwise.
I was playing with my young nephew. He was 2 years old back then. He had just learnt to speak. We were playing with his toys. While playing he picked up a toy cat. He handed over the cat to me and said, "this is you". Being a cat lover it was the complement of highest status to be compared with a cat.
I asked him why did he think that I am like a cat, "is it because I am cute like a cat?"
My innocent nephew gave me reality check, "because you have claws like kitty". When he said that I quickly looked at my nails. Those long, red painted, perfectly manicured nails seemed like claws to my young nephew. This conversation gave me a different direction to think about.
In the recent times nails and nail art has gained a lot of popularity. Once upon a time short nails and French Manicure were the trend. However nowadays having crazy long fingernails with complicated nailart is the trend. I see a lot of women on social media sporting several centimetre long nails which have intricate or sometimes tacky nail art. Most of the times these do not look good. In most settings these would be considered inappropriate. Moreover such long finger nails are impractical. Anybody with such length of fingernails would definitely have problems in completing the daily task such as texting, typing on the computer, or even adding salt to your food with hands. Keeping such nails clean will be an addon task. Plus there is always a hazard for injury. I have seen a lot of women using these nails like weapons. I still agree with using something like that in self defence however I have seen a lot of women using nails as weapon in crowded places to scratch other people and make way. This is completely in appropriate and unacceptable.
Next let me talk about the agony of breaking long nails. If the nails are natural and they break, then the pain is excruciating. If the nail is fake and it breaks I have seen women causing havoc. I have witnessed such an incident at one of my workplace, where a manicured fake nail broke and the woman started screaming at the person she was accusing of breaking her fingernail. Her accusation was completely about the financial damage that the breakage had cost. She repeatatively mentioned that each of her nail costed over rs 400 and she was asking the accuser to compensate for it. That behaviour was simply atrocious.
Most of these behaviours I have seen only from women however there are instances where men too are guilty of keeping long and sharp fingernails. As today's world is moving towards gender neutrality, men have also started keeping long finger nails which are as harmful as those of women.
This entire discussion bring me neatly to the etiquette that I want to suggest not only to women but also to men: Keep your fingernails short, clean, and blunt. Finger nails are organs and not weapons.
More by Amruta Kanekar
