Sharp dressed woman
Stiletto nails are in-your-face fashion that could also cut a face — as it should be
There’s an old episode of Will & Grace where the wealthy and wiley Karen Walker is getting her nails done in a salon. “Careful with those tips,” she says to the manicurist. “I want them nice and pointy in case I have to stab someone in the neck.” I watched the episode just after I turned 12, around the time I started to phase out of the tomboy scene and directly into socially acceptable femininity. The line was clearly a joke, but something about it sounded so appealing.
The nail trend at the time was square, grown just slightly past the end of your finger, filed cleanly and painted with white French tips. It said you were elegant, but approachable. The ultimate female calling card.
When I was younger, I always wanted to keep my nails long. My mom always had oval talons, expertly filed, painted ruby and glossy even when she was digging her hands into roti dough or ground lamb. I could never grow mine out like hers: They’d snap clean off or peel at the corners. My hands always looked stubby and inelegant. All I wanted was to look like a girl.
My fingers still don’t indicate womanly grace, but now I’ve found something beautiful and murderous to do with their tips.
It was my roommate who suggested I adopt the “stiletto nail” trend, after celebrities began sporting them a few years ago. I’d been thinking about Karen Walker’s quip for more than a decade, the idea of beauty so mean, so ruthless, so clearly not for you that it can cut your skin, so I leaned into this instinct and started filing my nails down to their sharpest points. For the first few weeks, I poked myself when I got dressed or scratched my cat when I tried to pet her, or tore through flimsy T-shirts. But I liked how they looked, even if they weren’t all that convenient. (For true obsessives, stiletto nails are typically fake, long enough that I’m not entirely sure how they do basic things like touch their own face or pull up a nylon, and they elevate even the most basic outfit to something instantly Instagrammable.)
Nicki Minaj gets hers decorated with crystals and prints, the Kardashians wear theirs matte and clean. But they’re not exactly new: In the 17th century, the Chinese wore their nails long and pointy to symbolize power and wealth. (Indeed, you can’t exactly do much manual labour with these talons.) Old Hollywood loved them too, showing them off in nail polish ads, long and shaped more like almonds than daggers.
Now, there are plenty of women of colour — Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, Beyoncé — along with popular drag queens — Alaska 5000, Alyssa Edwards — who’ve helped repopularized them, turning the tips of their fingers into a particularly aggressive kind of human decoration. The initial purpose of this nail shape may have been to suggest class and ele- gance, but if you ask me, it’s all about looking like a weapon.
This is a trend less about what the world may think, and more about the undeniable strength of femininity.
More than the aesthetic, I like that so many people don’t like my nails. Men, most noticeably, find them horrific. They scratch my boyfriend all the time without my noticing, so much so that I sometimes catch him trying to chew them off. I’ve had men on the subway stop me to ask how I maintain them, frowning in some warped com- bination of fear and interest. Others still will approach me to explain that men don’t like long nails. Men rarely like beauty that hurts them or makes them insecure.
I don’t grow my nails specifically to hurt anyone. When I accidentally stab my boyfriend, I feel bad, but there’s still something satisfying about seeing my hands as aggressors rather than defences. As almost any woman knows, our bodies are taught to shrink in order to protect ourselves: stay quiet, avoid dark alleys, don’t start a fight. It’s not that I’m looking for a fight, per se, but it’s nice when your outside starts to match up with the inherent aggression you feel inside.
It’s the quintessential non-verbal proclamation of not only, “look at me,” but, “f--k you, look at me, I could kill you in your sleep.” What girl doesn’t want to say that once in a while? I think it’s part of a broader trend of beauty that doesn’t care much if you like it: dark lipstick that stains everything it touches, aggressively filled in eyebrows that forgo the former standby of pencil line-thin brows, women of all sizes wearing crop tops whether you think they should or not. Beauty that isn’t for anyone other than the wearer.
My beauty routines, once dedicated to shrinking myself and being palatable, are now about making myself more present, less willing to vanish, darker, meaner, more aggressive. I wear red lipstick that easily smudges across my face, like I’ve just fed off something dumb enough to be weaker than me. I used to dedicate any diets or workouts to making my body as small as possible; now, I’m happy with my ever-expanding hips, my butt that could end civilizations. My hair is the longest it’s ever been, thick and somewhere between black and brown. I shed constantly. It’s easy to know wherever I’ve been.
Women’s beauty trends are about aesthetics, fun and feeling good in your skin — or stepping out of it just for a minute. But they can also be about furious presence, about making space for yourself, about letting your body be the aggression you delight in feeling.
“Nice and pointy,” Karen Walker said. I don’t actually want to stab anyone in the neck, but it’s nice to know I can.