"Because a bit of colour is a public service,” begins I* Shall Paint My Nails Red* by Carole Satyamurti. Hear, hear, I say. Regardless of the season, my nails are apple red.
During the Second World War, women across America were building tanks, planes and munitions, and they were doing it all in the colours of the Stars and Stripes – blue overalls, red polka-dotted headscarf, and what must have been, in that era, Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, or Scarlet Slipper. Clever crimson-tipped fingers were busy winning the war. Two messages are at work in the way in which women were encouraged to match Rosie the Riveter’s bright red lipstick on their nails: first, that a love of make-up and strong colour is anything but frivolous. Second, that red nails mean business. Red nails get the job done. Our prime minister knows both these truths, and wears a flawless crimson manicure almost every time she wears navy.
I cannot write without red nails. They function as talisman and inspiration. For 10 years, give or take the odd, treasonous flirtation when my head is turned by the vagaries of the season, they have been OPI’s Big Apple Red. In an act of recent daring, I explored a cousin, OPI’s Fashion a Bow, also crimson but with a stronger orange undertone. Buoyed by this success, I have since conducted another happy experiment. As I type, in fact, my nails are short, neat and wearing two coats of Essie’s Jelly Apple, and I am enjoying their flash and dance across the keys. But regardless of brand or nuance, my nails will always be a true, rich red. By all means hint in other directions if you must, but for me no blue-tinged raspberries, no summery corals, no ruby wines or blackish plums, not even now, in darkest winter. Indeed in winter especially, I would argue there is no other sensible option than the vivid, classic red of danger, of spilled blood, of life and heat and passion.
I am in conversation with my hands all day. They are before me on my laptop, in sporadic motion but most often at rest while I am thinking, musing, dreaming. In a perfect day in a perfect world I wish, at once, to be both Joan Didion and Joan Collins. Emulating the former takes intellectual exertion, erudition, innate genius – to try is almost certainly to fail. To feel a frisson of the latter’s womanly power, however, one need only open a new bottle of high-gloss lacquer. It is an instant signal, and no other colour shares its semiotic punch. (Incidentally, I have recently discovered that Joan Collins now has her own brand of nail “lacquers”, as she calls them – including, of course, a glamorous red.) In red, you will sit up straighter, I promise. You will speak with just a little more confidence. You will display to the world a glimpse of your fire within, even if, today, the rest of your exterior is not shouting quite so loudly.
The symbolic power of red is undeniable. Sex, love, power, danger: it has meant the same for centuries, whether you were a woman, a berry or a ladybird. In 3000BC, Chinese royalty were using beeswax, egg whites and vegetable dyes to colour their nails red, and in Ancient Egypt, red adorned the fingers of only the highest-ranking women, with pale colours reserved for the lower orders (“Just a natural pink today, thanks”).
Read more: 10 Best Red Nail Polishes
The manicurist Jenny Longworth says red is still her go-to shade for her own hands. “I love an orange base – OPI Monsooner Or Later, or Essie’s Lacquered Up. For cherry red, I’m obsessed with Topshop Ruthless, and for the original blue-based pillar-box, my go-to is Revlon Red.” It’s also popular among her younger clients. “Adele loves a classic red, and Rihanna as well. I used Dior 999 on Rihanna for the campaign Steven Klein shot in Versailles, and it was the last thing I did when I left her just now in Paris. Red just looks expensive. It’s grown-up and sexy, and now and again you just have to revisit it. And you can work it so many ways. Young, fresh; sexy, classic… I’ve said a lot of contradictory things.” She pauses. “But then that’s the point, isn’t it? Red speaks volumes.”
Because here’s the thing. For all the timeless optimism and glossy perfection of a fresh red nail, sometimes real life intrudes. One has to scrape encrusted porridge from a saucepan or pick off an intransigent label; one stretches a manicure two or three days – a week? – too far. Peeling nudes can look positively scabrous; imperfect darker colours feel grubby and teenage. But a chipped red manicure, rocked without apology, can be like a festival band, or a faded club stamp glimpsed on an inner wrist – the remnants of a fabulous night, a hint to the excluded onlookers that you were out somewhere you shouldn’t have been, perhaps with someone you shouldn’t have been with. Last night I was, in fact, out at 2am. I was buying a humidifier from a late-night pharmacy to combat the plague of winter colds that had suddenly descended like a sinister black mist upon our household. But, though I was in last summer’s harem pants, battered Nikes and a cashmere jumper from 2003, as I handed over my credit card I threw back my shoulders and allowed my fingernails to speak on my behalf: I am fabulous. Ignore all evidence to the contrary.
