My Life In Nail Polish

First a brief history:

The Egyptians used nail color to signify social order with Red being worn only by royalty and pastels by women in lesser social circles.  The Chou Dynasty chose gold and silver in 600 BC.  The Incas decorated their fingernails with pictures of eagles…..As for me.  Currently it is Essie Plumberry with a discoball overlay because I’m not allowed to wear Stepford Wife pink anymore.

My friend Julie and I have a bit of a sickness about nail polish.  For me I don’t know if it is the creative play on words or the tiny bottles filled with candy colored liquid that I like most.  At times just looking at the display makes my heart grow three sizes like the Grinch at Christmas.  It also makes me wonder what this obsession is with the myriad of colors that I wear on my fingernails.  Here is a bit of a surprising fact.  The primary ingredient in nail polish is nitrocellulose cotton.  This flammable and explosive ingredient is also used in making dynamite.

I had to think about that for a bit.  Basically I’m walking around with the equivalent of a bad Looney Tunes cartoon in the making on my fingers.  But I think they are pretty so I continue to buy bottles of nitrocellulose and plasticizer mixed the pigment.   Yes I know the truth will never catch on. 

What does catch on for me are the painstaking hours of mixing the perfect red or the most soothing of pink.  Even after that more hours of coming up with the perfect name, Like Susie Loves Cowboys or I’m Not Really a Waitress.  By the way the people at OPI are amazing.  It doesn’t stop there though.  They have to make girls like me want to buy that perfect red or most soothing pink. 

We sell ourselves every day in packages of our own construction.  Lately mine has been pretty shitty as I have tried to move from one life to another.  I’m ready to end this phase and move on to something more suited for me.

 I’ve never been one to plan for a future.  Yes I have always wanted to know what happens, but plan something?  Dear God I don’t know where I am going to be in 5 hours let alone 5 years, but for the first time ever I know what I want and I’m making a path to get there.  It is part of my perfect red

In Having New Eyes

     Fashion is full of good and bad ideas.  Fendi baguette bags good.  Neon leg warmers bad.  Coco Chanel gave the world the little black dress.  Ferragamo gave the world the stiletto heel, and I have given the world…..  I sit here for a moment and I think about it.  See I finished a book.  No easy feat I am told, but to me it was really more a matter of discipline than anything else.  It currently sits in the bottom of my nightstand waiting for me to sift through the ashes of thoughts and badly written sentences to be reborn like the phoenix.  I have no doubt that it will happen, because I have something much stronger then ash on my side.  I have constant whispers of you’ve got this from someone more remarkable then I could ever imagine.

      I also have beautiful cards in my mailbox that touch me deeper then the sender will ever know.  It makes me wonder if Coco Chanel sat around in her studio going over designs of something so seamlessly perfect that the world would make her an icon.  I wonder how often someone whispered to her you’ve got this when she was told how drab and depressing her little black dress would be.  I wonder if Ferragamo stood strong while around him people laughed when he told them women would worship his design and men would simply fantasize about those shoes at the end of fishnet covered legs.

     I haven’t had much to say lately and I have had even less discipline, but I am being told over and over again that I got this.  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.