Destigmatize toenails!
I may or may not have been high on painkillers whilst writing this.
This morning I had toenail surgery. It sounds dramatic, and actually, it kinda was. Four injections, two in each big toe, in order for my podiatrist to remove one toenail which was trodden (or should I say stomped on) at a festival several years ago, and parts of the other so that it can recover from being squashed by tight fitting shoes (I won’t apologise for loving a bitchy pointed toe, but most likely, the infection was spread by the other nail).
So, why the fuck am I telling you this, you’re wondering. It’s gross, people’s toes are gross, right? And yes it’s true, I have long been embarrassed by my aforementioned trampled toenail. I even covered it with a fake one last summer, whilst wearing barely-there sandals to a wedding, in case anyone dared to notice that it was a slightly odd shape underneath the glossy lilac polish. However, I subsequently spent the entire wedding panicking that the false one may ping off at any given point. Because then obviously everyone would stare at me, realise how disgusting I am, and not want to speak to me. Duh.
Like many other millennial women, my problem with needing to be perceived as ‘put together’ stems way back. I remember phrases from my childhood, spoken by my mother and her friends in passing—things like “Tidy eyebrows mean a tidy face” or “Always brush your hair before you leave the house”. My mother would paint her nails in the car, with three screaming kids in the back, ahead of doing the morning school drop off. Her steering wheel ended up being covered in blotches of pinks and purples, because god forbid she should arrive at the school gates with so much as a chipped finger.
I felt a huge amount of validation last month, when I read Jacqueline Kilikita’s article entitled “Why are we so repulsed by unpainted toenails?” Like Jacqueline, I was also taught that wearing open toed shoes without a slick of colour was unbecoming. It’s just something you don’t do. I have mentally recoiled at women over the years for exposing their naked toenails. It was only when one of my own, unknowingly stunted forever by a large man’s foot, became disfigured and I was too embarrassed to go and get a pedicure did I start to think—why does what we do (or don’t do) with our toes matter so much?
As Jacqueline’s article points out, it’s yet another form of sexism. Extremely laborious and expensive beauty standards are set for women, whilst all men are required to do is shower (or failing that, spray on some Lynx Africa and call it a day). Cis-men are often very quick to point out the multiple routines that women should upkeep to ensure that they are desirable (think of the Drake lyric: “nails done, hair done, everything did”) but have they ever heard of, let’s say, retinol? They don’t need to have, I suppose. When you’re a white cis-man, you can literally look like a shrivelled prune and still pull—case in point, Robert De Niro fathering his seventh child this week, aged 79.
Despite the many waves of feminism I have lived through and educated myself on, I am still concerned about not having a toenail on my left foot for the rest of my life. It’s not the male gaze I’m worried about (everything I do is for the bitches, after all) but more the fear of being thought of as unkempt. Whilst I realise this is ridiculous, just like many other beauty standards are, it takes a lot of effort to unlearn all the things I was consciously/subconsciously taught about appearance and femininity. Will I have to apply a false toenail every time I want to wear my MM6 satin, cup heeled, open toed sandals? I just won a brand new pair of Jimmy Choo x Ashley Williams crystal slogan strappy heels on eBay. Can I attend a fabulously glamorous party wearing these sans toenail? Quelle horreur, surely?
I guess the real problem for me lies within the fashion limitations. There’s only so far a fun sock/tight and sandal combo can take you, after all. It just wasn’t my destiny to reach Rihanna levels of toe bearing. But maybe I should say fuck it—some random dude trod on my foot so hard that even though I was wearing Dr Martens, he still managed to cause “significant trauma” to my nail bed. That’s not my fault! I shouldn’t be ashamed! Not everyone has picture perfect toenails, and that’s OK. So if you catch me in my Jimmy Choos, without a pedi, mind your business. It’s the next body hair revolution—I’m calling it.