When I was very young, my nails were never painted. My mother of blessed memory thought it impractical and a waste of time. My grandmother of blessed memory enjoyed a weekly ritual that seemed to remind her she was a woman of leisure, when she removed and replaced what had been chipped the week before with a fresh coat.

In French medical school, where I first had an awareness that female beauty was some kind of power or currency, I tried weekly polish for a little in the early years, but found it tough to maintain without chips, even with a pale color, and transparent did not seem worth the trouble. Men didn’t seem to notice, or care.

When I left surgery for other branches of psychiatry, there was a brief affirmation of nail painting, as if I were declaring to the world I was no longer a manual laborer, but an intellectual one. I even remember telling someone about the medieval guilds of barber-surgeons, but how nobody could lump barbers in with the esoteric works of an intellectual not-a-manual laborer type physician. Read more on Some Fingernails Just Aren’t Cut Out For Polish…