Nailing the new year

I recently made Havdalah during a weekend away with my partner’s friends. Everyone was singing in perfect harmony – bar yours truly who didn’t have a clue. As someone who grew up with zero traditions and felt slightly like a gefilte fish out of water, being witness to something so beautiful was nonetheless one of those precious moments in life that will stay with me. Shabbat went out, we held our fingers up to the braided candle and gazed at our nails in its light, the traditional explanation being that we need to make practical use of the flame in order to say a blessing over it. Though there are lovelier readings: the nails as the one part of the body that keeps growing, a small emblem of continuity as the day of rest ends and the working week begins.

Of all the things Jewish law might have chosen to think hard about, fingernails have attracted an almost baffling amount of attention. There is genuine halachic literature on the order in which you cut them (the custom recorded by the Rema in his glosses on the Shulchan Aruch is to avoid cutting them in sequence, so you might start with the fourth finger of the left hand and skip about from there). There is the widespread custom of avoiding nail-cutting on Thursdays, so that the nails are not beginning to regrow on Shabbat. There are rulings on what to do with the clippings: the Talmud in Moed Katan and Niddah warns that one who burns them is pious, one who buries them is righteous, and one who throws them away is wicked, on the grounds that a pregnant woman stepping over discarded nails could come to harm. It is one of the odder pieces of Talmudic folk-belief, and it survived.

On-trend polka dots (Photo: Pexels)[Missing Credit]

Classic bordeaux (Photo: Pexels)[Missing Credit]

My own fixation with my nails started early: once I started Tippexing them in the girls’ toilets at school, I never looked back. (My mother wouldn’t have dreamed of ever taking me to a nail salon as a child, unlike these days where you can often spot pre-teens hogging the pedicure chairs.) Nice nails can be a fun prop to drum dramatically on a kitchen counter or to add a flash of vampish glamour when you can’t be bothered to do a full face of makeup. In movies I watched as a kid, long red talons were the preserve of the “villainess” or mafia wives (in The Sopranos, Edie Falco’s claw-like French tips as Tony’s wife Carmela were an extension of her character, flashy and foreboding).

Years passed and I graduated from Tippex to Revlon’s Fire and Ice. When I discovered fake nails that weren’t the stick-on kind and didn’t snap off, I became hooked. Whether long or acrylic or just trimmed, bare and clean – nail care is the epitome of what beauty should be – a bit of self-indulgent fun that makes us feel good.