Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words

Lonesome Struggles of the Nail Artist (You Are Not Alone)

How to piss off a nail artist by a notorious Nail Blogger

1. The seesaw manicure: when you're painting a friend's nails and she has higher standards or sharper eyesight than you. So you let a tiny bit of color splat on the finger by accident, and she makes you rub the blemish off with a cue-tip, but in order to remove the blemish you also need to scrape a significant swath of intentional color off the nail. Then you have to replenish the paint on the nail, and in order to cover all the keratin a new splat of color needs to end up on the skin, identical to the one you just removed.

2. That slightly eccentric guy in the desk next to you who thinks its funny to ask if you'll do his nails (annoyance quotient correlates positively with his rising rate of tittering at his own gender-appropriating, transparent pickup line).

3. That rival artist who thinks she's slightly better than you, and pretends to admire your design before remarking, "I would have fixed those lines" or "If you knew how, you would have added some contour shading."

4. That wise elder who only wears clear polish with flawless French tips and dares to give you advice on style. ("That color is nauseating." "No, it's just Mer-Maid to Order by Sephora!")

5. The admirer who insists she couldn't possibly do anything as amazing as you, and you have to pretend to disagree, when inside you're thinking "Of course you couldn't. Come back when you have ten years of blood, sweat and acetone under your belt, and then we can have a fair duel."

6. The masterpieces that take hours to do, and which adorn your nails for a week, accompanying you to restaurants and shops, in museums and piano lessons, and no one notices them.

7. PINTEREST. And all the outsiders who suggest nail artists should salivate over the photoshopped, cliché, conformist nail designs that trend and trend and trend until their image scratches your corneas even through tightly-shut eyelids and a closed laptop.

8. Spending so much time on the actual nails you have no energy left to clean up afterwards.

9. Letting your friend paint your nails whole hand a gory red, and then watching as the only bottle of nail polish remover for blocks around drains its precious contents onto the porch, burning acid holes in your heart as you realize you will now have to shop for remover with Lady-Macbeth hands.

10. Having to dumb down the intricate plans you could have executed with your dominant hand on your non-dominant hand, because you couldn't execute them with your clumsy hand on your better hand, and you want all ten nails to look like they come from the same overall picture.

This lineup is admiringly inspired by “12 Struggles Only Violinists Will Understand,” a Buzzfeed post by Kelley Dunlap featuring funny, brief remarks by electronic music phenomenon Lindsay Stirling.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleydunlap/violinist-truths-according-to-lindsey-stirling?utm_term=.lln99axdV#.dbzYYmoPR

 

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