Online the “naked” look is credited as part of wider trends, including the “clean girl aesthetic” that has become synonymous with slicked-back hair and dewy skin. Dominated by wealthy, white women, it has been criticised for co-opting black and brown beauty habits. Ranking “naked” nails as more desirable than statement styles, especially when nails and nail art are so rooted in race, further taps into this, with some critics considering it a form of erasure.
Irene Shelley, the editor of Black Beauty and Hair magazine, says the “trend itself isn’t the problem: minimalism is a valid choice for anyone”. However, she says a problem arises when “a bare aesthetic gets coded as more sophisticated or more professional than a fuller, more expressive one that’s historically been coded as Black or working-class. Nails should be allowed to be a form of self-expression without a hierarchy attached to them.”
Ateh Jewel, a beauty journalist and broadcaster, compares it to Coco Chanel making tanned skin desirable among the white upper class in the 1920s. “Beauty is just another way to see how culture reflects power, status and racial prejudices,” she says. For Jewel, who has “always loved a ‘naked’ nail as well as “colourful fun nail art”, her own personal preference is now colour. “I only wore black and had naked nails before the BLM movement. Now I’m leaning into nail art and wearing pink as I don’t adhere to old social structures any more.”
For those who are tempted to fake the “naked” look, Goddard says the most important factor is to choose “a reputable salon where they’re applied and removed correctly.” She also suggests avoiding at-home gel kits as “improper removal can cause damage”. As for ditching the polish to let nails “breathe”, Goddard says that is a myth. “You don’t need to take breaks,” she says. “Nails are made of dead cells. As long as your nails are healthy and your manicures are applied and removed properly, there’s no reason you have to go without polish unless you want to.”
A lot of Buzzfeed-type articles, of which this article may or may not be a part of, exist to drum up engagement since the business model is to pump out new articles on a daily basis to maximize exposure to ads. So it can be hard to be sure whether a proposed problem is a genuine one felt by a significant part of a marginalized community. Like, there were a handful of queer- and trans-focused think pieces in 2016 HuffPost that would sometimes make me raise an eyebrow, just to provide a personal example. And in many cases the author doesn’t bother to provide hard data or evidence of harm being done beyond one or two interviewees, which was the case here.
The downside of some well-meaning online activism is it can lead to some extremely perfunctory actions like changing one’s profile pics for one week to “support BLM” before resuming their lives as normal, or even radicalize people farther right after mistakenly thinking some odd think piece is what we all uniformly think.
I want to be supportive and open to criticism, and there’s a lot I don’t know, but I’m also skeptical of capitalistic news agencies that can sometimes cause more division than unity. But if someone in my personal life felt I was doing cultural appropriation with my personal aesthetic, I’d want to know so I can stop doing that.