Polishing Up

My relationship with makeup is a contentious one, or at least it would be if I actually had one. I hardly ever indulged in the Mummy's-dressing-table type shehanigans, which was why she was more than a bit surprised when I bought my first pot of black nail varnish at eleven*. It's about the only variety of cosmetic I buy on a regular basis other than lip balm, the reasons wherefore are a bit of a long, dull story.
I'm not sure exactly how the nail varnish craze caught on among us tweens, but the only thing I can be absolutely sure of was that my school's strict no-makeup policy had quite a bit to do with it- all that forbidden fruit logic and so on. No matter- we just painted our toenails instead of our fingernails, and as for those I'm fairly sure acetone suppliers had an excellent time of it, what with all the goop we had to clean up and take off before going to school. As most good tweens across the world today seem to do, we favoured the sparkly, but for some reason red and pink- probably because they were seen as 'mummy colours'- were banned from use (I quite liked red sparkly polish, but given that not being a total social outcast in those days was dependent on not wearing naff things, I behaved as a good little sheep should and went right along)- and once my lot got tired of wearing plain blocks of colour, we began experimenting with nail spots and stripes and flowers- some of which required work with very thinbrushes that were subsequently ruined because the varnish dried onthe brushes. The freaky part? People actually volunteered to do it- spend hours painting each other's nails, I mean. They were short nails too, because school insisted on that**- but they still took ages to dry. And then we reached the eighth grade and- heaven knows how- nail colouring was consigned to the trend dustbin. We were supposed to be more grownup, so about five bottles of half-used nail paint in my possession were doomed to uncooldom, and I was an expert on how fast they dried and how long they lasted and just how to mix colours, and the knowledge was pretty much useless***. I still buy the pots now, though- mainly because I like to see them sitting on the shelf and they're the only vaguely girlie things around- I don't own so much as a kohl pencil (standard Indian college girl fare, as far as makeup goes). And lately I've been getting the urge to break out the sparkly silver polish again, only my twenty-two-year-old feet aren't anywhere near as pretty as my thirteen-year-old ones (Queen Michelle, you were right about the sun exposure. If I wanted to look at a living example of sun damage, all I need to do is look down.). And no neon on my nails, I don't care what Nu Rave thinks.

*those were the good old days when the word Goth didn't exist in my vocabulary (actually, it did- Germans in Asterix) and hipsters were trousers, not people.
**I've never been able to get over the conviction that long nails are dirty. I end up reaching for the clippers every time I get to see the edges of my nails over the tops of my fingers.
***My mum was quite relieved, though- she hated my nail paint. But the bottles that remained did get put to good use- every time I got given babysitting duties for my then two-year-old niece, I simply put a coat of colour on her nails (it didn't take much time since they were so tiny) and told her to sit still with her hands out till they dried. It made a nice change from chasing her to make sure she didn't break her neck or anything else in the house.