Making It Up As I Go Along (4 page)

May I speak freely and frankly with you about
nails? Okay! Thank you! Well, for my whole life I’ve had very ugly hands. My fingers are
short and stumpy, my knuckles always remind me of ET’s face, and as for my nails –
don’t be talking to me! I’m not being self-deprecating here in the hope that
you’ll like me, I really do have horrible nails and for my entire life they’ve made
a show of me.

It’s not just that they’re short and
break the minute they grow a millimetre, it’s that they’re all different shapes.
I’m like a variety pack of nails, where you get one of each of ten types. The nail on my
index finger on my right hand is
definitely
my best: it looks normal and nail-shaped
and it grows and doesn’t always break; I still remember the Summer of the Good Nail with
wistful longing. (I was twelve at the time.)

To strengthen my nails I tried doing that thing
of eating a cube of jelly a day, but a) I think it might be an old wives’ tale, and b) I
couldn’t stick to just one cube a day; instead I ate the whole packet every time.

So basically I disengaged from my fingernails for
most of my life. I didn’t even – gasp! – get a manicure for my wedding day! I
just showed up with my bare, crooked-shaped nails, and although I try not to have regrets in
life, that would definitely be one.

The thing is, I love colour and I love nail
varnish, so I’ve always painted my toenails. But I would punish my fingernails by
showing them the varnish and saying, ‘Lovely, isn’t it? Well, NONE
for you!’

Then I started getting pedicures from my lovely
friend Helen Cosgrove. She’d paint my toenails some gorgeous colour and then she’d
insist on also painting my fingernails, even though I’d be shouting, ‘No, Helen, no!
They don’t deserve it. Don’t encourage them.’

However, I quickly grew to love having colouredy
fingernails. I’m a divil for bright colours. They have a huge effect on my mood. They
cheer me up enormously. When my nails are painted, it’s like having fruity hard-boiled
sweets sellotaped on to the ends of my fingers. Nice nails make me deeply happy. (When I can
force myself to do my gratitude list – I’m supposed to do it every night, but to be
honest I only do it about once a week – coloured nails always feature. Hey, you take your
pleasures where you can.)

Then Helen gave me a present of a bottle of lilac
nail varnish and, amigos, that was my gateway drug …

I started buying nail varnishes. Left, right and
centre, as is my way, when I’m in the grip of an obsession. I was – and still am
– extremely attracted to Rimmel ones. They have a massive range of colours, and as well as
having all the pinks and reds they also have edgy, directional colours – I’ve just
bought a yellow one from them. And the thing about Rimmel is, their nail varnishes cost half
nothing.

Then I found an
even cheaper brand
. In
my local chemist, where I spend a goodly portion of my life with my various ailments, I found a
brand called Essence and I got the cutest glittery mauve one the other day for one euro,
seventy-nine cents!

Now I must veer off slightly to another story
here, if you’ll bear with me. About a year ago, I started getting the Shellac and/or
Gelish nails (they’re much the same). I’m sure you know about
them, but just in case you don’t, they are sometimes called the ‘two-week
manicure’. And sometimes they are even called the ‘three-week manicure’, and I
can personally vouch for that. And in a world that’s full of marketing spake followed by
crushing disappointment, this was a THRILLING success for me.

I go to Elena and Mihaela in Pretty Nails Pretty
Face in Stillorgan, where they paint some chemical on my nails, stick my hand under an LED light
for thirty seconds, then paint on some lovely colouredy varnish and stick my hand under the yoke
again, then once more. The nails are dry instantly!

So I’m spared all that awful time hanging
around, being underfoot in a saloon, waiting for them to dry. (It’s not so bad with hands,
but my idea of hell is the time spent waiting for painted toenails to dry so that I can put my
socks and boots back on and continue with my life. It is a purgatory of a time. I get more and
more panicky as the minutes elapse – twenty minutes, thirty minutes – and I’m
still not allowed to leave, and often I jump up and grab my socks and cry, ‘It’s
fine! All dry! Please let me through. Leaving, goodbye, thank you! See you in three weeks, but I
must leave now because I just must. No need to check the nails are dry, I am a woman of my word.
Goodbye.’ Of course the nails are NOT dry and I am NOT a woman of my word and I get the
pattern of my socks imprinted on to my still-wet toenails, but if I’d waited one second
longer, I would have gone bananas. And I know I should get flipflops, but I live in Ireland. For
much of the year I’d get trenchfoot if I started sporting flipflops.)

So yes, Gelish or Shellac or Artistic Colour
Gloss and their ilk are wonders. They don’t chip (except sometimes you can be unlucky and
bang your hand off the corner of something and a piece of your Shellac-iness will choose to
leave you). They come
in a range of colours that is growing all the time,
and they are getting blues and purples and turquoises and other lovely shades. And the best bit
is 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 a
Superdrug 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 nail varnish or indeed any beauty product. Item 3) I
am in the pay of no one. If I rave on to you about a product I love, it’s because I really
do. What I’m trying to say is that you can trust me.

mariankeyes.com
,
April 2013.

Let me tell you about my Chanel nail varnish
museum. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a thing for Chanel – not the suits
and the couture gowns, I hasten to add; sadly I’ll never be that woman – but the
cosmetics. Even in my twenties (as I’ve already told you), when I was totally skint, my
lipstick was always Chanel. Something about the sleek cylinder with the iconic interlocking Cs
elevated my life beyond its shabby reality, where I spent my rent money on wine, my wardrobe was
missing a door and every night at 2 a.m. my upstairs neighbour strapped woks to his feet and
tap-danced loudly enough to wake the dead.

Eventually my circumstances improved and I was
able to embrace other products from the Chanel oeuvre, particularly the foundations, but their
nail varnishes didn’t feature on my radar because of my very disappointing nails. (Short,
weak and a bizarre selection of shapes, as I mentioned in the previous piece.)

However, one November I was in Henri
Bendel’s in New York, in the throes of a bout of MITHness (mad in the head-ness), where
the world seemed like a smoking, post-apocalyptic landscape.

Suddenly I saw something so exquisite I thought
my eyes would burst – it was a nail varnish. It stood alone on a plinth, radiating a
greeny-blue beauty powerful enough to light up the planet.

You know when people use the
phrase ‘I fell on it’ to imply that they were extremely keen to get the thing? Well,
I
literally
fell on it. I threw my body over it, like I was shielding a baby from
gunfire, because I was so afraid that someone else might get there before me.

A chat with the salesperson established that it
was a limited edition Chanel nail varnish called Nouvelle Vague, and Himself was so relieved to
see me excited about something that he bought it for me. And right away I was in the grip of
another addiction.

I’ve no end of addictions: alcohol, sugar,
Twitter, sleep, box sets, spending money … I could probably get addicted to paper bags if
I put a bit of effort into it (white? Manila? Patterned? With handles? Without? Flat? Or with a
fold-out base?).

Addiction is often called the disease of More
– because when we experience something pleasurable our brain produces dopamine (‘the
happy hormone’). So if you’re an addict like me and you find something you like,
you’ll keep replicating the experience in the hope of generating fresh hits of delightful
dopamine.

The long and the short of it was, I needed more
Chanel varnishes, and mercifully family and friends helped out. Each little bottle marked an
occasion: my mammy gave me Vendetta as reimbursement for paying her milkman while she was in
hospital with pneumonia; Rita-Anne handed over Azure as thanks for minding the Redzers; and
Caitríona bought me Atmosphere in Rome airport because she was flying back to New York and
I was going home to Dublin and who knew when we’d see each other again?

I spent (and still do) an unholy amount of time
on eBay, yearning after discontinued limited editions as rare as gold dust. However, I was badly
bruised by my first – and only – auction, where I battled for Skyline (from the Bleu
Illusion collection, but
hey, you probably knew that). I live-tweeted the
bidding and frankly I thought I had it in the bag – but I was outbid at the very last
second (and it was literally the very last second: people explained to me later about Sniper and
other such fiendish jiggery-pokery). So I limped away and now I simply hint heavily to my loved
ones about which discontinued varnishes I crave.

Of course, there are always the new ones arriving
‘on counter’. And something incredibly amazing happened to me in May 2015. I’d
been doing a beauty column for nearly a year for
Irish Tatler
and I’d been sent a
lot of athlete’s foot ointment and acne-banishing face washes, but nothing at all from
Chanel. One morning I was working away when the doorbell rang and Himself dealt with it. Then I
heard him coming up the stairs and I assumed he’d taken delivery of a dandruff-banishing
shampoo or something equally unthrilling. But when he came into the room he looked ashen, and
when I enquired as to what was making him seem so shocked, he silently held up a small black
cardboard bag, with little rope handles. A small black cardboard bag, with the word CHANEL
written in white.

‘… no …’ I uttered
through bloodless lips.

‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Yes.’

‘Quick!’ I commanded, my lips rubbery
and disobedient. ‘Quick, show me!’

Together we tore at the bag and out tumbled FOUR
CHANEL NAIL VARNISHES!!!!! Yes! The Summer 2015 Méditerranée Collection, and even now,
remembering the beauty of the colours makes me feel warm and happy! We shrieked with excitement
and jumped around the room and I shouted, ‘I EXIST!!!’ (I’m not exactly sure
what I meant, something to do with Chanel acknowledging that I was worthy of their nail
varnishes meant I felt endorsed as a human being.)

Then! The bell rang again!
And Himself and I exchanged haunted looks.

‘Is it the Chanel man?’ I asked.
‘Back to take the nail varnishes off me?’

‘Feck,’ Himself uttered. ‘Maybe
they were meant for Liz-next-door?!’

You see, in a bizarre coincidence, Liz-next-door
is also a beauty editor, and she’s a full-time real one, instead of an enthusiastic
amateur like me, and she gets LOTS of fabliss stuff and I know this because sometimes we take in
deliveries for her.

‘Don’t answer,’ I said.

‘I
won’t
answer,’ he
said.

‘I’m not giving them back,’ I
said. ‘I can’t.’

‘You’re
not
giving them
back,’ sez he. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law. We’ll just barricade
ourselves in here and refuse to surrender.’

As it transpired, the varnishes really
wer
e intended for me, but the fact that I was willing to break the law is a sign of
how the Chanel-lust sends me insane.

Over time, by all these different means,
I’ve built up a fairly sizeable collection but – this is where I might lose you
– I rarely wear them: they’re far too precious and I’m afraid of using them
up. I get my pleasure simply from looking at them.

But I was embarrassed by my carry-on. Until
Himself suggested I turn my thinking on its head and regard them as precious
objets
(French word) and not as nail-pigmenting workhorses. It was a eureka moment and shortly
afterwards came the first mention of the word ‘museum’.

The museum is housed in a handbag (not a Chanel
one – I’ve never owned one; like I said, I’ll never be that woman) which lives
in the bottom of my wardrobe, and I now have about forty
exhibits.
(Actually, I’m lying. The number is closer to sixty, but an addict always tries to
downplay the full extent of the problem.)

In my more whimsical moments I suggest taking the
museum on the road and displaying it in parish halls around the country, so that everyone can
get to marvel at its beauty. Each varnish would stand alone on a tastefully lit column, bearing
a short description of its provenance. And of course, on my deathbed, I will bequeath the
collection to the Irish people. Or the V&A. I’m still deciding.

When my friends bring their little girls over,
there’s always a great clamour to see the museum, so I take out The Handbag and delicately
unveil selected bottles and in a hushed voice say curatory-sounding things like,
‘Here’s a very rare blue, dated Summer 2013, which I think you’ll
appreciate.’ But their eager little hands start grabbing the exhibits and pulling them
from their boxes and then – then! – they sometimes have the audacity to
try them
on
!

Before I know it bottles are upended and boxes
are being stood on and I start snatching the varnishes back from reluctant little hands and I
snap, ‘Thank
you
.’ In a high, tight voice, I say, ‘Stop crying,
Felicity. That’s enough of the museum for today, girls. Let’s move on to the home
bingo kit.’

Some people go to art galleries to receive an
infusion of beauty, for other people it’s elaborate gardens, but I can’t tell you
the happy,
happy
hours I’ve had, lining my varnishes up on my bed, sometimes
colour-coding them, sometimes acting out
West Side Story
where a pink falls in love
with an orange, and on those joyous occasions when I receive a new varnish, instagramming a
David Attenborough-style documentary as it seeks to integrate into the herd.

Yes, we take our pleasures where we can.

First published in the
Sunday Times Style
,
April 2015.