To fake or not to fake

I'll admit it, I have a dirty secret. I'm a bitter. A nail bitter. Year in, year out I've tried to stop but it never sticks. Sometimes I succeed for a couple months but then I'm back at it. I even wrote an essay when I was 13 entitled “My Proudest Achievement" which outlined how I had overcome adversity to stop chewing my nails. That didn't last very long.

Three years ago, after firmly believing I was damned to be a nail biter for life, my friend recommended that I try fake nails. But didn't fake nails belong in the same category as orange tans and hair extensions? I swallowed my apprehension, put my prejudice aside and got the fakes for my birthday to see what they were like. Glue, file, paint, polish. An hour later and I had nails! Beautiful, natural looking, glorious nails. Suddenly I was a girl. My hair was swishy, my hips swayed, my mascara seemed to stay firmly attached to eyelashes. All because of these newly gotten gains.

The thing they don't tell you is that as your nails grow, the acrylics don't and they begin to peel at the edges. Acrylic also gets old and needs to come off on a regular basis so instead of chewing I was picking at them. And they're thick, so they aren't good for when you need to scratch your back or your nose. But at least, most of the time, they were pretty.

When the recession hit, my job went with it and suddenly rent became a luxury so the nails had to go. As I hadn't been biting for a few years, I thought I could hack it but I'm back to biting with a vengeance. Unintentionally, I'm curling my fingers inward and hiding non-existent nails and hangnails from sight. On top of that, I miss my old nails. I even miss the clickity clack they made on the keyboard.

So the question is...do I dive in again? Get the nails, keep them up or keep hiding my hands away? I should have more willpower, yes, but when an hour in a little beauty shop in Wandsworth yields such beautiful results, why should I?

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik