It started in the pound shop on the high street in Basildon when I was sixteen and skint. Proper skint, the kind where you count coins for a bus fare and still come up short. They had this little stand of nail polish bottles, all chipped lids and faded labels, two for a quid if you were lucky. Most of them were the usual pinks and reds that every other girl at school was wearing. Then I spotted the bright blue. Electric, almost glowing under the strip lights. I bought it because it was the last one left and I liked how it looked against my skin, nothing deeper than that. Took it home, sat on my bed with the window open even though it was February, and painted my fingers while some reality show droned on the telly downstairs.
Mum walked in halfway through the second coat and just laughed. Not mean, just that Essex laugh she does when she thinks you have done something daft. She said it would chip off in two days and I would look a state. She was right about the chipping. I never could keep a manicure tidy. But I kept buying the same cheap blue every time the bottle ran out. Toes as well, because why not. I painted them sitting on the bathroom floor with my feet in the sink, the water running cold because the boiler was playing up again. It felt like a small private thing, just mine, while everything else in that flat was shared and loud and someone else’s problem.
School was the first place people noticed. Not in a big way. Just the odd comment in the corridor, “nice colour, Webb,” or some lad calling it weird. I did not care. It was easier than explaining why I could not afford the posh stuff the other girls used. Those bottles cost more than my weekly dinner money. Blue was cheap and it stayed. By sixth form I was doing it every Sunday night like a ritual, even when I had coursework piled up. The smell of the polish mixed with the vape I was not supposed to have yet. I would sit there with my glasses sliding down my nose, hair in a messy bun, painting away while pretending I was concentrating.
When I moved to Hackney the habit came with me. The first flat was tiny and the heating never worked properly. I would sit cross-legged on the mattress on the floor, barefoot because socks felt like too much effort after a long day researching some story that would never get commissioned. The blue stood out against the grey carpet and the cheap IKEA rug I had bought second-hand. I started filming little videos for Instagram around then, just talking to camera about whatever had wound me up that week. I never planned the nails to be in shot. They just were. I sit like that, legs folded, feet tucked under me or sticking out, because it is comfortable. The polish caught the light from the window or the cheap ring light I bought off eBay. People started commenting. “Love the nails hun.” “What shade is that?” I ignored most of it. Thought they were just being nice.
Then the Reels took off a bit. Not massive, but enough that strangers would message saying they recognised the blue before they even heard me speak. One woman in a Tesco car park actually said it out loud. I was grabbing emergency wine and a wrap, hair everywhere, hoodie on, and she pointed at my hands on the trolley. “You’re the one with the blue nails from those videos, innit?” I laughed it off, said yeah, and she told me her daughter had started painting hers the same colour. That stuck with me more than I expected. A kid in some other town copying a cheap habit I picked up because I could not stretch to anything else.
It is funny how something so small becomes a marker. I never sat down and decided this would be my look. No branding meeting, no aesthetic board on Pinterest. It just happened because I am lazy with beauty stuff and I like the colour. In the videos I am usually in some oversized cardigan or sweatshirt, glasses on, talking too fast about whatever latest bit of nonsense is in the news. The nails are the only consistent bright thing. They pop against the beige or grey I wear. People say it makes me look approachable, like the girl next door who also happens to be shouting about systemic this and that. I do not know if that is true. Sometimes I think it just makes me look like I cannot be bothered to match anything properly.
There was a phase where I tried to stop. After one particularly chaotic week of deadlines and The Coven group chat exploding over some leak, I bought a bottle of nude polish. Thought I would look more “professional” for a Zoom with an editor who had actually replied to one of my pitches. Lasted three days. The nude chipped worse than the blue ever did, and I missed the brightness when I looked down at my hands while typing. Went straight back to the pound shop equivalent in the Tesco near the station. Same electric blue, different brand, still cheap as chips. I painted them that night with a glass of wine on the go and the telly on mute. Felt like coming home.
People ask what it means. They want a story, some deep feminist statement about reclaiming colour or rejecting beauty standards. I usually just say it is what I have always done. But if I am honest, there is a bit of class in it. Growing up we did not have money for salon visits or those gels that last three weeks. Nails were something you did yourself, badly, in front of the telly. The blue was never about looking expensive. It was about having something that was mine in a house where everything else got used up or argued over. Now when I see comments calling it “iconic” I have to laugh. Iconic my arse. It is a two-quid bottle from the same aisle as the cheap deodorant.
I have lost count of the times I have been mid-sentence in a video and glanced down at my hands without thinking. The colour is just there, like the glasses or the messy hair. It has become part of how I show up. Sometimes I catch myself wiggling my toes on camera without realising, the blue flashing as I shift position on the floor. Viewers notice that too. One bloke in the comments said it was “distracting in a good way.” I told him to jog on, but I get what he meant. In a sea of polished talking heads it stands out because it is not trying too hard.
There was this one interview I did last year, in-person for a change, some small magazine that actually paid. I turned up in my usual hoodie and jeans, nails done the night before because I had forgotten until the last minute. The photographer kept asking me to put my hands in shot. I felt self-conscious at first. Then I thought, sod it. This is me. The photos came out and the blue was the first thing you saw. The writer mentioned it in the piece, called it my “trademark.” I read that line three times and still could not decide if I liked it.
Mum still takes the piss when I go home. She will look at my hands over the roast and say they look like I have been at the felt tips again. Then she asks if I want her to do my toes while the potatoes are in. I usually let her. She is better at the second coat than I am. We sit in the kitchen with the radio on and she talks about the neighbours while I try not to smudge anything. It is one of the few times the habit feels connected to where I came from instead of the version of me that lives in Hackney and argues with strangers on the internet.
I have thought about changing it. Properly thought about it, not just the one failed nude attempt. Maybe go dark or just stop altogether. But then I picture sitting down to film and looking at my hands and seeing something else. It would feel like starting over, and I am too tired for that. The blue is easy. It is cheap. It lasts just long enough between coats that I do not have to think about it every day. And if people recognise me by it before they hear the accent, well, that is their lookout.
Last week I was in the supermarket again, same as always, and a girl who could not have been more than eighteen tapped me on the shoulder. She had the same colour on her fingers, a bit messy, like she had done it herself on the bus. She said she started doing it after watching one of my videos and it made her feel like she did not have to spend a fortune to look like herself. I did not know what to say except thanks. We stood there for a minute by the reduced section, two sets of blue nails under the fluorescent lights, and I thought about that first bottle in Basildon. How something so small can travel further than you ever planned.
I still buy the cheap stuff. Still sit on the floor to paint my toes. Still chip it within days because I cannot leave things alone. It is not a look I chose. It chose me by staying when everything else in my life kept changing. And for now, that is enough.