Nail salons "have taken the country by storm, particularly in the last 10 years. Today, free standing nail salons dot the commercial blocks of various towns throughout the country."
So says The Daily Star, with quotes and statistics to back up the writer's assertions.
Care to guess what country she means?
Lebanon.
War-scarred Lebanon, Middle Eastern Lebanon, has women running around with airbrushed and bejeweled acrylic tips. Our world is ever smaller; Lebanon, forever fashionable.
Salon nails are a hallmark of modern culture. They are like club music or a video game, like low-carb specials at Ruby Tuesday, like a movie starring Nicole Kidman and not Kate Hudson, who was two years ago.
This is now.
* * *
I'm at the mall.
Usually, months go by without my setting foot in any retail establishment except Starbucks or Eckerd's.
But it is Christmas week. So here I am, observing the hands that handle money, open jewelry cases, test batteries. They fumble. They slip. They twist this way and that.
Open the roll of dimes, I taunt silently, as I watch a high schooler frown, befuddled. Go ahead, you can't. Your nails won't let you. Or you won't test them. You are Freddie Krueger. You are not of this planet. Or you are, but your fingers are not.
I remember emery boards, cuticle scissors, acrid-smelling polish remover (29 cents for the Rite Aid brand) and thick, pearly paint. I remember these items like the typewriter, like the skate key, as I ponder this young woman struggling to take my money.
* * *
"I am the owner," says a masked woman hunched over a hand.
She's working a kind of electric sander. Over and over the square-tipped fingernails it travels, while another woman dotes over the same customer's red-polished toes.
Ah, bliss.
Three boys play Gameboy on a sofa as I explain my purpose and offer to wait. A second customer, presumably the Gameboy mom, declares that she would never, ever talk to a reporter.
Girls roughly the age of my daughter, who still plays with Barbies, arrive asking for pedicures and fill-ins. I don't know what a "fill-in" is. My husband is right. I am clueless about popular culture. One girl wears a shirt that says, "Comfort the Disturbed. Disturb the Comfortable." She'll pay a stranger to clean her feet. The irony kills me.
I discovered King Nails, corner of Waters and Wilsky avenues, on a dull December day when I kept myself awake perusing postings on a Westchase Web site.
"I found a nail salon for my wife and she LOVES it," wrote one Donald Lloyd. "Their service and friendliness are very comforting. Their prices are very reasonable, and their quality of work is well worth the price. Their shop is very clean and is free of odor. Finally they speak ENGLISH."
Language is a hot-button issue in this industry.
Close behind on the controversy continuum, a glue called methyl methacrylate. MMA is so powerful, they say it will rip the nail right off your finger if caught or jammed. It's unhealthy to breathe, too, hence those ubiquitous masks.
I'm offered a drink, then allowed to wait until the owner's husband arrives to speak with me.
"I read about your salon on a Westchase Web site," I tell him. I ask his name.
He is Donald Lloyd, author of that flattering Internet post.
We laugh. "It's just good advertising," he says, not at all sheepish about his little fake-out.
Vietnamese-born Lloyd and his wife, Kim, have had this place seven months. It's always been a nail salon, he says. They are the fifth owners.
You should have seen it when nails really took off, he tells me. "If you had gotten in six years ago, you could be raking in some serious cash."
All he can do now is try and outshine owners one through four.
He visits other salons to "observe their issues." Some are dirty. Some smell. Some sell beverages. At King, the drinks are free. "Something that small goes a long way," Lloyd says.
He shuns MMA, uses hospital-grade filters to cleanse the air of other fumes.
But the main emphasis is on service.
"Speak English," he reminds the four women who work here. "It makes the customers feel more at home."
* * *
Nails Magazine offers tips for nail neophytes:
Treat your nails "like jewels, not tools," they say. Dial the phone with a pencil eraser. See a technician every two weeks.
Apply a "top coat" with UV filters if you're in the sun a lot. Wear gloves for housework and gardening.
Online, you can buy special hand creams to preserve your nails.
* * *
Back to Christmas. A British spacecraft is lost over Mars. Or under Mars? In the Martian atmosphere? I care only if it carries a live astronaut. The craft weighs 143 pounds. One less thing to worry about.
I read about Michael Jackson, who is my age. Madonna is, too. We are aging badly, my generation. We are freaks and the world feels freakish around us.
I consider this quote from downtown Beirut.
"For many of us, perfectly manicured nails have become an essential part of our everyday lives."
