In recent months, Paloma Buddemeier has watched a stream of people walk into her nail salon with the goal of looking as if they'd never been there at all. "It's crazy," the owner of Wumman Spa in London says. These customers still get their nails filed, buffed, and trimmed.
"You still do the cuticle, you do the soaking and hydrate everything," says Buddemeier, "but you just put no polish on." Driving this, she says, is a viral craze for bare-looking nails. In recent months, artsy shots of glossy naked nails have been flooding social media and taking over fashion runways and red carpets, which some are viewing as the latest symbol of "quiet luxury". But critics argue the bare nails trend actually says something about class, the hamster wheel of beauty standards, and who gets to define what is considered tasteful.
Nail art's historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures, they say. "That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities," beauty journalist Kristina Rodulfo tells the BBC. "They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty." For some, though, the choice is less about a dislike of bold nails and more about simplifying their routine.
Some converts say they're ditching polish as a way of rebelling against an entrenched female beauty standard or to save time and money. Others just love the look. Then, there are some women who've long left their nails alone, amused to find their routine – or lack thereof – suddenly in vogue.
For years, Irish TV presenter Angela Scanlon marched herself to a nail salon every fortnight, a routine that started when she was living in New York in the 2000s. There, she says, manicures were so universal they felt like a uniform. But it soon became a chore.
Scanlon would have everything from thin, shiny shellac to sturdier "Builder In A Bottle" gel manicures layered onto her nails every other week without fail. "It wasn't like I was in my head going: 'I must go because Dave from Hull is going to be disgusted if I'm on This Morning next week without a full set'," the Radio 2 presenter says. "I just added it to the list of things that we must do... in the way you would wash your hair." Eventually, in a moment of clarity, Scanlon decided to stop going, in a bid to free up time and mental bandwidth.
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