I always bit my nails as a kid, and would often chew all of the whites off until they were bleeding. My parents would occasionally spray something bitter on them to deter me (there was a border collie on the label of whatever it was, which I won’t question too much). Nail biting is usually chalked up as an anxious behavior, but I can get more specific than that. I haven’t asked any other nail biters about this, but I know that I did it specifically to try and make them even after they got dry and broke. Biting and peeling, of course, cannot accomplish that. I could stop perseverating as soon as the nail in question was a uniform shape — or at least too short to do anything else about. In high school, I began painting my nails more regularly because I found it fun and it helped me stop biting my nails (not my cuticles though, sorry). Of course, as soon as they chipped, all the polish had to come off. A single chip meant they were no longer perfect.
“Perfect is the enemy of good.” I have been trying my best to incorporate this maxim into my life in 2024, especially when it comes to my projects. Done is better than perfect, and fear of making mistakes is a bad reason NOT to start something. In that time, I’ve made a couple sweaters and a baby-sized quilt, projects that I previously told myself were beyond my skill set. The first attempts were far from perfect, but surprise surprise, the later ones are better. It’s more important to me to focus on finishing what I’ve started rather than getting to 80%, feeling frustrated about the end product, and then giving up for fear that it’s less than perfect.
In the throes of a Covid breakup in April 2020, I ordered a Braun epilator for over $200 on Amazon to my parents’ house. My sister, whom I shared a room with, thought this was a stupid purchase — paying that much money to slowly yank your own hair out? I told her no… this is going to change my life. I’m going to decrease the frequency of the ingrown hairs that pop up everywhere that I would rather dig out of my skin than leave unnoticed from afar. I won’t have to shave, I’ll just epilate every 4-6 weeks and have perfectly smooth skin without paying for laser or waxing ever. This $200 investment would serve me for the rest of my life. Once it arrived she had the good grace not to laugh at me, only raising her eyebrows as I sat on the floor of our room, wincing every few inches I was able to manage. To my indignation, within a week and a half the dark hairs were growing back, ingrowns and all.
In college, my roommate gave me a manicure kit as a Christmas gift that said on the outside “There is nothing a fresh manicure can’t fix” — a little clunky, but I love the sentiment. I love ignoring a long to-do list to give myself a manicure. Doing your own nails, making them clean and uniform again, signals to your brain that you do have control over your environment. You can put yourself back together again, torn apart in so many directions.
Some dip sets I did in college In college, forever frustrated with my nails that would chip within 36 hours of painting them, I started doing dip. Maybe I’m just profoundly stupid, or else the learning curve for these things is much steeper than they advertise. I would end up with mounds of poorly bound and shaped acrylic on my nails, which was of course a tactile nightmare that I had to rip off immediately. I would also experience weird respiratory symptoms after every manicure, which I didn’t understand until the manufacturer of the dip kit I was using published a blog post about the so-called “dip flu”, which can happen to some people who use dip powder… I wouldn’t have even known about this probable OSHA violation if I hadn’t been so desperately searching the blog for tips about how to make the stupid things look right !!! I eventually gave up and donated all my dip powders to a coworker who also does dip, and godspeed to her.
I have always had thick brows. I so overtweezed them in high school out of self-consciousness that my parents threatened to take the tweezers away if I didn’t rein it in at the end of sophomore year — and thank god they did. In my adulthood, clearly not dissuaded from putting strong chemicals on my body, I have turned to $16 eyebrow lamination kits from Amazon to do my eyebrows. I have tried to do the lash perm ones as well, but I can never glue the molds onto my eyelids by myself. Since I scared myself straight about overtweezing my eyebrows, I have been reluctant to do any major shaping. Recently, though, I have started trimming them to make them more symmetrical and I like it. I also taught myself to thread my eyebrows from TikTok, and I’m not perfect at it but I can remove larger swaths of hair with some perseverance. Trimming my eyebrow hairs to be shorter makes it so that I feel like I don’t need to laminate them anymore? We’ll see.
At-home brow lamination in 2022 with my natural brows vs how I've shaped them more recently When “That Girl” TikToks started appearing, they put words to a phenomenon that I had experienced in isolation for many years. There is enough discourse effectively criticizing “That Girl”, so I won’t add to that conversation here. There is giggling “oh I’m just such a perfectionist!!”, there is “women are conditioned to be perfectionists” discourse, and then there is the actual mental hell of constantly setting standards for yourself that you will never meet. And my nail biting habit, always wanting my nails to be uniform and even, would suggest that I’ve been putting myself through that hell for quite some time. I’ll just buy this $200 epilator and then on the body hair front, I’ll be good to go! I’ll start doing dip and my nails can grow long and pretty! I’ll record diligently in apps, in “wellness journals”, I will be so ridiculously disciplined and then I will be be perfect. And the unspoken promise: I will have obtained such control over my environment that I will finally have peace. The most recent iteration I have seen of this concept is the “High Maintenance Things I Do to Be Low Maintenance” genre of video.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRwW9bT3/
(One day Substack might fix TikTok embeds, but today might not be that day, sorry)
I was historically not a self-tanner girl, because I am blessed with the ability to develop a pretty good one if given the opportunity. I think that made me think I was better than self-tanner? I’m not, and a little Isle of Paradise on the face can go a long way in the spring when I’m at my palest. I don’t use it religiously, just when I notice that the contrast between my dark circles and skin is growing uncomfortably drastic. I am one of those people that feels much more confident when I’m tan, so I’m happy to announce I no longer bear judgment towards self-tanner users which means I can reap the benefits of it! There’s definitely a balance to be struck between letting a man in an advertising meeting somewhere convince you of the failures of your physical appearance and feeling confident via the products we use. I think we must all walk that line in whatever way we can. But as I get older, if it doesn’t bankrupt me, then I have found it can be worth it to just buy the thing that makes me feel better about myself rather than agonizing about it forever. In short: buy the self-tanner, and don’t judge other people for their own insecurities (pot 🤝 kettle) because you are only making a judgment about yourself.
Since 2022, I have converted to gel nails. I tell myself not to mess with them, bite them or try to peel them when they’re not completely perfect (they never are!) When I can manage that in the first 24 hrs of putting them on, they last for about two weeks! I love that you can manipulate the gel however you want it before curing it, something you can’t do with regular lacquer and dip. It allows me to take my time to get the look I want and isn’t as stressful. Controversial take, but aside from the initial investment of a lamp, I don’t think doing gel at home is more expensive than regular nail polish. I have finally accepted that I don’t have the nail thickness to grow them out, even with builder gel, so I recently bought gel extensions so I can have the option for length when I want it (see above: just buy the stupid thing and stop worrying about it). I’m still learning how to do those and not rip them off when they’re not all perfectly straight/accidentally glued to my cuticles, but progress is forthcoming. AND after 4 years of epilating, I can confirm that it does eventually get less painful, takes longer for the hair to grow back, and grows back thinner and with fewer ingrowns. Rather than worrying about epilating on a schedule, I came up with the solution of stopping shaving when I start my period, letting the hair grow out for a few days, and then epilating when my period is over. I shave afterwards to remove dead skin and any hairs I missed, rather than sitting there with tweezers and individually rooting them out. Then I can REALLY feel like a new, sexy person with estrogen to spare and hydrated, smooth skin, so it feels like a treat rather than a compulsion. It took me a long time to be able to sleep with itchy leg hair in that interim period — the irritating feeling between the sheets was equivalent in my brain to “not being put together” and felt pretty triggering — but I can do it now! Growth!
I wish someone would have told me as a teenager that I would figure it out. No one knew what glycolic acid was until like 5 years ago, so how am I to be faulted for the horror that was the red bumps from my Bic razor sans exfoliation in my dorm shower? I’ve had the extremes of thick and thin eyebrows, and decided I like them somewhere in between. I have finally found the manicure and pedicure that I like and that I don’t think about in between sets (or am at least pretty close). No one comes into adult womanhood knowing how to do a full beat, or how to actually wash out a hair mask so you don’t go to school with hair that looks wet but is actually just coconut oil. The important thing is knowing that you have choices. As a teenager, the marketing of beauty standards felt so crushingly stressful because it felt as though I HAD to figure this stuff out in order for someone to hand me a valid Adult Woman card. It provided a scaffold for anxiety and the desire for control to latch onto. I love an everything shower as much as the next person, but there is an anxiolytic quality to it, isn’t there? The pendulum swing back into some invisible meridian, the reassurance that we are starting the week performing femininity to the best of our ability.
“Perfect is the enemy of good.” I recently bought this cat eye gel because I love the look of Korean nails and wanted to try it for myself at home. I would say I actually achieved the cat eye effect with the magnet on 2 of my 10 nails, but I left them on, knowing that from afar they just look sparkly and I can try it again (with a stronger magnet I think) when I do another manicure in 2 weeks.
Physical imperfections, previously proxies for my anxiety about other events in my life or about my body itself, can now pass through my mind without getting stuck there. My nails look nicer, and there aren’t excavated craters on my legs, in my armpits and bikini line anymore. I can actually let a zit go without hyperfixating on it and making it 1000x worse. I let my hairdresser trim my bangs, leaving the sewing scissors alone. Another thing I wish I could have told myself: there is another side, you will get there in time, and peace is possible. There will come a time where participation in this shitshow will become more neutral (i.e. just buying the Ginzing eye cream and not looking back rather than searching the cost of under eye filler because I’m pmsing and feel ugly) or even positive (wanting to try cat-eye gel bc it seems fun!), rather than punishing. I am grateful to myself for keeping at it.