Making It Up As I Go Along Read Online Free PDF

that my own nails grow underneath – the hard cover of the Gelish/Shellac protects them
from breaking – and for the first time ever my nails are long and my fingers feel slender
and elegant. (Long nails are like high heels for the hands.)
    Naturally I wondered where the catch was –
because there’s always a catch. Sure enough, dire warnings began to circulate that my
natural nails would be ruined. But my natural nails were horrible anyway – they
couldn’t BE any more ruined. I had nothing to lose!
    However! When you have your nails Gelished, you
are stuck with that selfsame colour for two to three weeks, and I must whisper something to you
… I started to get bored. All around me were delightful nail varnishes whispering,
‘Buy me, wear me,’ and I had to lift the palm of my hand and shove it at them, like
Wonder Woman repelling something, and say, ‘I cannot. I am on a different path in life
now. I am a Gelish-stroke-Shellac girl. Please stop tempting me, for I am weak
…’
    But then! I came up with a WONDERFUL solution,
which is all my own invention, if you will permit me to be a boasty boaster. What I do now is I
get Gelished in clear varnish! Yes, so I get the strength and length and non-ridginess –
and the chance to change my colour myself every two or three days. That is to say, I myself, not
a manicure person, paint my nails and although I do an imperfect job it’s good enough for
me. And so long as I use a remover that is acetone-free, it doesn’t damage my Gelish nails
underneath.
    So I’ve mentioned Rimmel and Essence, and
may I talk to you about Barry M? Everyone in the UK knows about Barry M, but I don’t think
we get it in Ireland because when I discovered it in aSuperdrug in Saffron
Walden (land of my parents-in-law) I nearly took a weakness and keeled over in the shop. The
colours! The glittery over-coats! The low cost!
    Then there’s Illamasqua! Be the Janeys,
they really are ‘out there’ regarding the nails; they even have ones which promise a
‘rubberized’ finish, which I am desperately curious about. Anyway, I finally got my
Speckle in lilac – I don’t know what went wrong with the post, but it took a month
to get to me – and it is strange and beautiful and I love it.
    And please may I mention one more nail varnish.
It’s called Vapor and is by the ever-fabulous Tom Ford. It’s a pearlescent
white
– yes! White! Which at times looks almost silvery and will be
’straordinarily striking on tanned hands and feet. It’s so … different. It
blew my mind when I saw it and then I thought, ‘But of
course.
How come no one
else thought of it!’
    I brought six nail varnishes over to my mammy the
other evening, to paint her nails. She was baffled by the Rimmel yellow, utterly
baffled.
She couldn’t BELIEVE that people would wear yellow nail varnish. ‘But I am
ould,’ she said. ‘What would I know?’ She lingered a while on the Illamasqua
Speckle, obviously very drawn to it. But in the end, didn’t she go for the Tom Ford!
‘You have great taste,’ I told her. ‘Magazine editors and famous people will
be wearing this colour this summer.’
    ‘Are oo in airnesht?’ she asked,
evidently extremely pleased. (Translation: ‘Are you in earnest?’ aka, ‘Are you
telling me the truth?’) ‘Say his name again for me,’ she says, ‘so I can
tell them at bridge.’ So she wrote ‘Tim Vard, nail varnish’ on a little piece
of paper and put it in her handbag, ready to do a bit of swanking around the bridge tables. I
told her that she’d written the name wrong and she said she didn’t care, that her
bridge players would still be impressed.
    So thank you, my amigos. It
was all there in my heart, bursting to be let out. I really needed to ‘talk’ about
all of this and thank you for indulging me. Just a few things I feel I should say. Item 1)
Loving colourful nails is not incompatible with being a feminist. Item 2) PLEASE don’t
ever spend money you haven’t got, on