I don’t like “regular” long nails. I would not want to be in the same room with someone who had the ones cited for the poll.
Eyebrows. I don’t always notice fingernails, but there’s no avoiding eyebrows.
No, they’re not. At a stretch, the last one MAY be trying to be funny. The first two are textbook examples of chola brows.
Fingernails, but both creep me out.
Speaking of “sandal weather”, I was watching Hardball with Chris Matthews. He had on two partisan shills to shill their respective partisanship - two balding, middle-aged white guys in suit jackets. The weird part was that they had one camera shot of all three seated at the same table. And the Republican was wearing sandals. With bare feet. I had to pause the DVR to make sure.
Is this the new style? Jacket, tie and sandals? Or is it the sartorial equivalent of the Mullet - “Business in front, party in the back.” Or is Hardball like one of those really fancy restaurants that will loan you a jacket if you show up not wearing one?
Is Anchorman the next great fashion trend?
I used to work with several women with the long fingernails. And they were always bitching about how they had to be careful about cleaning.
I also used to work in a convenience store next to a nail salon in Las Vegas, in the 80s. Women would come in, ask me to get out their wallets and then their money, because they’d just had their nails done. And I could see that even though they were freshly cleaned, there was still crud under the nails.
Maybe I just ran into the 200 women who had issues with cleaning under their long nails. But I think that these women were not oddities, but more likely representatives.
Heck, I keep my own nails no longer than 3/8 inch long, and when I snip them down to about 1/8 inch, it’s easier to clean under them. And that is SHORT. And yes, I do scrape under my nails, and when I’m home, I use a nail brush every time I wash my hands in my bathroom.
I just saw KD Lang in an interviewwith Tavis Smiley and she was barefoot. Are we comfy?
They asked you to get their stuff out because their nail polish was wet, not because they were afraid they were going to break their nail.
As far as the people you encountered still being dirty. . . I don’t know what to tell you. I run into gross people all the time at gas stations and the like, but that’s just because they are generally gross people, not because of the length of their nails.
Trust me when I tell you, as someone with long nails, it is MUCH easier to keep my long nails cleaner than the short ones. Again, likely due to the ability to apply upward pressure to clean under the nail farther than I can with stubby nails. In addition to that, any CLEAN PERSON with long nails is going to take extra care to avoid infections, since acrylic and fancy polish can often hide the signs longer then a natural nail, if not actually harbor a happy place for a fungus to grow.
It’s alright if you don’t like the aesthetics of long nails (really, I promise-- you can dislike something purely on that basis), but this really isn’t the type of place where we throw around a bunch of warrantless claims. Long nails are in no way, shape, or form less clean than short nails. GROSS PEOPLE will have GROSS NAILS regardless of the length- maybe you’re just more likely to notice the long ones.
Uh, based on THOSE pictures, the fingernails definitely. Those nails are like 10 times longer than the ones I imagine when I hear “excessively long fingernails”, those are absolutely hideous.
The eyebrows are ugly too, but I have seen a few cases (mostly cybergoths) where it kind of suited the individual and didn’t look too bad.
Yes, I know that they had fresh nail polish on. And I know that that’s why they asked me to get their stuff out. My POINT was, these women had just had their nails soaked and cleaned, and they STILL had crud under the fingernails.
Oh, and they also wanted me to open their packs of cigarettes, get one out for them, and light it up. Which might have accounted for some of the crud under the nails.
And I’m telling you, it’s not just gross people. Nor is it just me. If you ask people who don’t have long nails, then I think that the majority of them will mention the crud factor.
I wore acrylics for 8 years when I worked in banking. Since I switched to vet tech during the last 10 years, I keep them clipped all the way down and natural. I can say, as someone who’s had nails for long periods in each style, they get just as dirty/stay just as clean at any length. I think it must depend on the person. I’ve never used a nail brush, never needed one. My index finger nails need to be scraped out once a day, maybe, and they’re always immaculately clean after each daily shower. It’s been the same no matter the length of the nails.
Nails bug me a lot more than the eyebrows do. There are good reasons to paint one’s eyebrows on, but excessively long nails look trashy unless they’re well-done, and not everyone can be an artist, IYKWIM.
I used to work with a girl who, for reasons known only to her, had a fairly long set of acrylic nails put on that had a very intricate design. We worked in data entry, where nails are not a virtue. She was so afraid of screwing up the design on the nails that she barely washed her hands, and was so afraid of breaking a nail that she had to slow down, forcing the rest of us to pick up the slack. Our male manager finally had a female manager sit down with her and explain that those kinds of nails are not appropriate for the kind of work the job entails, and that she would do well to have them shortened to a manageable length or removed. The nails came off.
OK, I didn’t think fake nails were any less clean than real ones until you said this (creepy, but not dirty). It makes sense that bacteria and moisture could get trapped in the glue sandwich between the two nails, and I know that having fake nails weakens your natural ones, so increased infection is a logical thing, I’d just never thought about it. I’ve never had a nail infection in my life, and can’t think of anyone close to me that has. I’d think the whole invisible festering rot problem would be an excellent reason to stick with short nails.
Silly Diosa. You are so dumb. Lynn will school you:
This place is totally dedicated to fighting ignorance… unless it’s ignorance you personally hold. That’s when you rabidly defend your ignorance with such rigorous citations as “ask anyone, man!” (especially when it’s, “X totally has Y problem. It’s nasty. Want proof? Ask anyone who doesn’t have X; they’ll totally tell you Y is a problem even though they don’t have X to begin with!”).
I mean, it’s not like there have been multiple people with long nails (For the record: I’m using “long nails” to describe any length of nail where you have more than a sliver that goes past the nail bed. I’d still say these are “long” nails for the sake of the crud discussion, because there is almost 1/4" of tip that extends past the nail bed. Stuff getting caught under your nails will get caught the same damn way if your nails are that length or if they extend another 1/2" or 1" (or more).) in this thread to disabuse her of her ignorance. Wait..
I keep my nails long all the time and I have never gotten anything remotely resembling a nail infection! Granted, I don’t use fake nails, but my nails are always clean.
Gross people are gross people and will be gross with short nails or long nails. Clean people will be clean no matter what. I can’t help but think this is confirmation bias.
I think this must be more about the fake nail thing than the length of the nail, I can’t see why natural nails that are just (reasonably) long would be any harder to clean than short natural nails, but I can see how gluing plastic nails to your natural ones could cause problems. If anything, I’d think that women who can be bothered to paint and grow out their nails probably spend more time looking at them than people like me, who just keep them cut short, and would thus be more likely to notice any crud that has lodged itself under them.
That’s another thing. I admit to being a little bit vain about my hands, but I truly do have very beautiful hands, so of course I keep them clean, and neat, and cut hangnails rather than pulling them (shudder) and keep my nails clean.
I only don’t paint them that often because I am not filthy rich and thus have to wash the dishes (:() and it’s a PITA to maintain them.
Eh. I’ve never had a nail infection and I’ve been wearing acrylics for 10 years, on and off. Then again, I clean my nails. The point is that most folks who wear acrylics or their nails longer are aware of that risk (they tell you at the salon) and take extra care to make sure that doesn’t happen to them, which is why the claim being made by others that long nails are inherently dirty is a bit strange.
I think you’re missing my point about the infections. It isn’t that you get an infection between your natural nail and where the acrylic is smacked on-- you would still get that theoretical infection in the regular place: your nail bed. The difference is that if there is no polish or acrylic or gel on your nails, you’ll be quicker to identify something is off than if that area is covered. So, because things can go undetected longer, folks who regularly paint their nails or put on acrylic tips or whatever are more likely to keep their stuff clean, because that is a better way to fend off infections.
Preach.
Preach it. But hey, she worked at a gas station thirty years ago and it was next to a salon, she knows her shit, ok? Just because you actually have long nails doesn’t mean you know better than her about keeping them clean- she’s got experience you can’t even step to.
Wrong.
So. . .that wasn’t one of the warrants you were using for your claim?
I’ve never worked at a gas station. The store I worked at didn’t sell gas. It was open 24 hours, and had a deli as part of it, and yes, we DID slice meat and cheese to order, and make up our own salads, it sold rotisserie chickens (roasted in the store) and barbecue ribs (also cooked in the store), it sold fresh fruits and veggies, and it sold liquor, not just beer and wine. In other words, it was more like a mini grocery store than a convenience store. The nail salon was open 12 hours a day, and was very busy. Many of the salon patrons would come in before or after getting their nails done, as well as many of the manicurists. The customers with wet nail polish would have the workers pick out some stuff, and then get the money out of their wallets. We drew the line at carrying stuff out to their cars, though, as we weren’t supposed to leave the store itself.
While most gas stations DO have a convenience store associated with them these days (and I can remember when getting a soda at a gas station was a novelty, if it wasn’t from a vending machine), a convenience/corner store usually has a much broader customer base, and that particular store was more than a convenience store. It was not easily categorized. But it was a heck of a lot more than the typical c store/gas station combo.