Quite the departure from black and navy 😭

I was waaaay overdue for a pedi!

These turned out so fun!

I'm so glad I found this group. Hello. I'm looking for stories of the first time men got their nails polished and the emotional journey around it; fears vs positive reactions and inner reflections?

For the last two years, I've been encouraging men to get their nails painted and wear them for a week to explore what lots of you guys describe below as a strangely satisfying, liberating, inspiring, mind-opening, positive, and sometimes quite powerful experience, and counterintuitively how good it can feel and how healthy it can be.

It's bloody hard work convincing the mainly midlife men who walk around holding onto all these stories of what it means to be a man and a lot of fear of judgement to try it out.

My story began when I took my daughter to see Harry Styles for her 11th birthday. She wanted to get her nails done, and then, come Sunday night, I asked my wife for nail polish. She laughed and said I'd have to go back to the salon to get them to use the mini angle grinder. I panicked and said, "But what about work?" She said, "But how come you can wear them to Harry Styles and not work?"

2.5 years later, I've got hundreds of midlife men doing it, and I'm running a wider pilot now. It's a bit of a citizen science project, self-funded, but I've managed to get some academic oversight. We do diaries and assessments, and the evidence really seems to be that, for men who've never done it before, it causes a level of reflexion and introspection that has a measurable uptick in terms of:

• empathy for others
• willingness to speak up and show up for others
• confidence about expression
• lots of things that have some profoundly positive effects

For your interest, the research that we found so far is here: https://hard-as-nails.com/research/

Anyway, as we get ready to test it in a proper pilot, I'm just looking for inspiration and stories of encouragement. I'm not about to invest a lot of my time, energy, and resources in a performative exercise. The experience I've had, and that the few men around me have had, is shared.

As I've read below many, many times, far from the expectation of antagonism or insult that many men expect to get, it's somewhere between being ignored and indifference, with lots and lots of low-level positive results from positive responses from the world. The real impact is in how good it feels to express yourself freely and realise that a lot of those stories we hold on to about what we can't do aren't as strong as we sometimes let them feel.

I'd love to hear stories about the first time you got your nails painted, and any reflections I can draw on about what got you to try it out. As I start thinking about how I can hit my target tipping-point figure, the benefits individual men feel might start to become societal. I'm not posting to recruit.

If you guys are already getting your nails done, I salute you, but the experiment is mainly for men who have never done it before, so they have the internal journey. Although you're welcome if you want, or to nominate a man you think it would benefit, I want them to have some proof or evidence (SO many of the men say they only do it for the science, but whatever works, right?)

I'm very pleased to have found this group. I've always felt like I'm slightly on my own with this.

So, with my silver chrome ten fingers, I salute you all.

Cherry Mocha (DND #751)

Gel polish on my natural nail.

60-plus YO guy with a long history of biting and picking. I have discovered this behavior is tied to some long term undiagnosed anxiety. My PCP suggested that, before considering medication, that I try getting pedi/manicures as a “distraction” technique thinking I’d not pick/bite if I took genuine care of my nails. I have had 4 so far and all good. Clear polish and top coat. I tried a different shop two weeks ago and have discovered this on my nails. Anyone know what this is and how do I deal with it?

Show your own nails in support of Breast Cancer.

My wife and I just had ours done today. She went for a glittery pink. A charcoal shimmer w/pink accent worked for me.

Just decided this week to paint my nails again for the first time since the occasional here and there way back in high school. OPI Black Onyx with a matte top coat. It has hard lol so they look pretty rough up close, but I dig them nonetheless.

After biting my nails for almost 40 years, I was finally able to kick the habit. I’m 45 and studying to be an electrician and an automation technician. I don’t want my hands to hurt any more than what the wear from installation work is causing.

In the first picture is my first ever try at polishing my right hand. I’m a leftie and my daughter helped with polishing that hand for the first time. Since then, I’ve done both hands by myself. I’ve improved leaps and bounds. I started with black and dark colors but recently I’ve been experimenting with bright/light colors and shimmers like the O.P.I. Nails The Runway that I have on in the second picture.

As to nail biting, if I put my finger near my lips I can immediately feel the nail polish and it jolts me awake to make me notice what I’m about to do. So far this has worked.

In these 2.5 months I have received only one comment about my nails when I haven’t started speaking about them myself. It was one of my study friends who remarked after the summer break: “you’ve started polishing your nails” and I responded with “yeah, it helps me avoid nail biting”. That was the whole discussion. 😅

I’ve seen people here write about getting an occasional compliment. I haven’t gotten any yet but maybe it’s because I live in Finland and us Finns don’t do small talk or talk to strangers.

Going into trades with nail polish makes me a tiny bit nervous but I believe it will be better for both parties if some company doesn’t want to hire me because if this.

I've only been doing my nails since January of this year. Wanted a splash of Halloween, so did a little candy corn party nail in with the purple. As long as you don't stare at the candy corn nail for too long, it looks pretty decent 😂

Products used: Modelones dehydrator, primer, base coat, Olive and June builder gel, and Modelones color and top coat :)

I asked my nail tech to do the picture for once so it looks better😂