Oh, aren't we all.
And by all, I mean our nails.
All my life, I (read, the girls of Durban), joked about the poppies of JHB with their poofed up blond hair do's and their perfect, perfect nails.
In my late teens I marveled at the girls of The Hills (I sometimes still check out what LC is doing on thebeautydepartment.com). They had this uber social lives and, though we saw them layering on their makeup and curling their hair -always curling, never blowdrying or straightening or just tying in a knot nog al) we never saw them painting their nails.
So I put this whole perfect nail thing down to pure fantasy thinking that, clearly, there are finger painting fairies that come in the night and blow the perfectly painted nails dry so they don't get duvet marks. You know the ones I'm talking about. I obviously just don't have a fairy!
That, or I missed out on some nail painting part of growing into a lady because I was too busy doing pointe work and swimming laps.
They covered shaving knees in that class too, I'm sure of it.
So when I got to JHB I just figured that all the working gals must have mani pedis over lunch. Surely?
Or they all go to a super secret salon that opens at bizarre hours just so they can fit this fancy stuff in between work and ALL the socialite-ing.
I didn't crack the nod.
But then one day, as I was driving along a slow moving freeway as one does so often in JHB, I looked down at my steering wheel and saw... my finger nails.
It dawned on me - the women of JHB are so particular about their nails because they spend so long looking at them in the car! The non-moving-because-traffic-is-bad car.
I started to do what so many JHB-dwelling females before me have done.
It started with a nail file. Then there was the hand cream. Then I thought, my car is not moving and my hands are positioned perfectly in front of the air vents so if I paint a nail quick it will dry even quicker!
And just like that, I became one of them.
I still don't get the extra volume hair do's, nor do I think I ever will, but at long last, I finally understand the nails.
