What my nail polish stash says about society at large and what OPI thinks of their customers in a worst case scenario.

Before I moved to Honolulu to study abroad for the final year of my BAs I had little experience with nail polish. Up until then it was something I would randomly smear on my nails whenever a significant occasion would present itself and then gradually pick off over the course of the following days/weeks (depending on how many boring lectures I'd attend). I had already been to the US for vacations prior to my move and knew it was a shopping mecca for a heavily taxated North European, so for months before going I refrained from any material temptations. As a result I arrived in Honolulu with savings specifically dedicated to shopping and an empty suitcase. 

As those savings emptied I discovered a nifty trick: A bottle of nail polish could spice up almost any boring old look at the passable cost of 5-8 dollars, and so the seeds to my polish infatuation were sown. Before long I could intuitively spot the outline, shadow or logo of a bottle of Essie or OPI at astonishing distances and would track it down without any hesitations like a cat in heat, thinking to myself "is that a bottle of Big Apple Red?". Soon I would roam the streets of Honolulu hunting for new polish joints. The best places would always be the dodgy drug marts / souvenir shops where a large plastic bin would typically hold the potential promise of delivering an amazing find. Before long I had, needless to say, accumulated a solid collection of varnishes (and a ditto tan). Life was good. 

Not so many decades ago, women had to search long and hard to locate more than a dozen or two of colors if they wanted to paint their nails for special occasions or everyday indulging. That all changed in the early 1980's as two of the now leading brands of lacquers, OPI and Essie, saw the light of day and largely changed the way women thought about nail varnish. The signifiers of their products were not the then usual numbers that had previously been used to identify that burning coral red or the subtle baby pink; instead (I don't know who started the practice, both brands are recognized for it although OPI tends to do more word play that Essie, the more conservative one of the two) you could now go to the salon and have your nails painted in the hue of "Ballet Slippers" or "I don't give a Rotterdam". It was a brilliant move, not only filling a gap in the consumers' life they didn't even know existed, but giving those gaps names that would stick even after the polish had been removed. Since then the market for nail lacquers has exploded, it's an affordable luxury item. Today a quick google search will reveal an excess of nail bloggers who will review formulas, swatch colors (nail/color lingo for uploading - preferably - high quality photos in good lighting that displays the true color of a polish as it may be impossible to tell all the qualities of a color while it's in the bottle) and analyze the details of new collections (brands like OPI and Essie typically release 4-6 collections per year), identifying dupes  or duplicates (colors that are indistinguishable from each other across brands and years), debating similarities between China Glaze's For Audrey and Essie's Mint Candy Apple (one has more green) and listing detailed facts about personal polish collections sufficient in size to repaint The White House into a thousand similar, slightly different whites. Surely, the internet has made this galore possible, but one may ask herself as she's about to buy her 5th cobalt blue polish (they're not the same, they're similar), what's in a color? 

As my own collection has grown (yet not to the point of making possible a White House paint-job) I have been increasingly confronted by this question. Not so much by myself as by my better half with whom I've cohabited for two years by now, and with whom I've moved from Canada to Switzerland. I mention this as it was the first incident when the matter of my tendency was brought up. It was, for the apparent reason that if you're suddenly faced with the need to transport 7 kilos worth of nail polish across the atlantic in a check-in bag, you may find yourself endeavoring to devise a protective russian doll-like construction of nail polishes in ziploc bags in socks in shoes. This venture will be noted. And comments will be made. In my case they were not understanding. 

Since then I've been much more aware to keep my 'hobby' under the radar, because I know he will never understand it, similar to how I will never understand the need to own five pairs of skis or four pairs of soccer shoes. Yet they represent the same material refuge from everyday life: when you're painting your nails, racing across that field, flying down that slope, you're not thinking about your tax returns or the constantly returning task of vacuuming your white tile floors - You're simply suspended from reality for a short while. But at some point a collection of anything material grows beyond the point where it's a simple afternoon or hours worth of serene, thoughtless refuge. 

As pastime hobbies and leisurely pursuits are being transformed from exactly what they are - relaxing diversions from the stresses of modern life that we engage in solely for our own, selfish enjoyment - into resources increasingly seen and thought of deliberately as a way of investing in our ability to be ever more efficient workers, producing ever more cost-effective, streamlined labor in all aspects of our existence, exorbitant collections of nail lacquers, skis or soccer shoes may serve as a form of seizure of power against the fiscalization of our lives. Yet they do so through the means of it, thereby possibly mocking it further. "Oh, how joyous it is to be the owner of something as useless as 500 bottles of nail polish!" In your face, cost efficiency society. I refuse to play your game.

But there is another aspect of the polish-mania that I can't help to notice. It's a product loaded with so much femininity, an almost mythical femininity. Being a little girl in the 90´s I still remember some of the nail polishes my mom would wear, and I would sigh at the thought of getting to wear them myself, they were like breasts - aspirational and completely representative of the womanly. My parents were openminded people, but they didn't feel it was appropriate for their 6-year old child to sport a vampy red nail color, and thus it was forbidden and therefore even more alluring to my greedy eyes. And I can still visualize the results of my renegade polish heist one afternoon; my fingertips covered in lumpy red paint and my moms reaction when she discovered the marks on the couch. There's something so ridiculously femme-fatale-sexy, in that stereotypical understanding of what sexy embodies, about red nails. Today the range of colors considered appropriate to wear is ever expanding and I can wear red any day if I want to, the aspirational level inherent in the product is of course intact even as one reaches polish maturity.

Given the thoughts I've been giving to my silly obsession it struck a cord in me lately when I saw that OPI had released a Bond Girls-themed collection of colors. (Yes, as in James Bond; they often pair up with singers or film productions.) Now, sure I'll buy a polish from a Shrek- or Muppets collection, but were they really designing and selling women nail colors representing the possibly most blatantly misogynistic series of films ever produced? (If you're a cultural dyslexic or just plain forgetful, here's a list of examples of some of the stellar sexism brought to the world by James Bond over the years. http://movies.uk.msn.com/features/james-bond-sexist-misogynist-dinosaur?page=8#image=1) Were OPI mocking those who bake their bread and churn their butter? I had the feeling they were. What was I to make out of this? What aspirational level was implied in this line of products? As I stood there, examining hues like "Pussy Galore" - sure, naming the female lead 'Pussy' is totally fine, not discriminating at all - I suddenly lost my appetite for color. 

For reasons entirely selfish I don't want to call nail polish a latently misogynistic type of product, but there is a conflict between the way it is marketed in for instance OPI's Bond Girls collection and the way it's consumed by women. Women who, in spite of these products being affordable (yet OPI costs 23,90 francs per bottle in Switzerland making it significantly less affordable than it is in North America where the going rate for a bottle is between 9-11 bucks) still need a certain financial leverage to accumulate collections as large as those I've seen documented online, thereby obviously being independent members of society. What do we fantasize about when we paint our nails? I think I need some more time to sort through it, and maybe there'll be a part 2 some day if it turns out there's any more to it, but for now rest assured that you won't see any Pussy Galore on my fingertips any time soon.