No one warned me of the struggle it is to entertain your duality as a bad b*tch and a scientist. I have proudly worn acrylic nails for the greater portion of my life and have successfully maneuvered mouse handling, electrophysiology and all the other meticulous techniques related to my *job* that require fine motor skills. I have published papers on my work, presented at conferences and survived year one of graduate school. After all this hard work and proof of productivity that lives in the glorious document that is my CV, people (PIs and other graduate students) still fix their mouth to ask me “HoW dO yOu GeT aNyThInG dOnE wItH tHoSe?” The answer is effectively.

This question is often surrounded by pseudo-admiration. The inquisitor often starts with “wow, your nails are so pretty,” and ends with “wow it must be really difficult to ~ insert activity here~.” It is, indeed, very difficult…For you. 

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This commentary may seem really trivial, but it is embedded with a number of assumptions. One assumes that an element of my self-expression would interfere with my ability to do my *job*. One also assumes that because you cannot do it, I must (at the very least) struggle. This mindset can trickle over into much more than my pipetting and my nails are simply lower down on the list of traits that could yield my perception to others as unprofessional… much like being black was once unprofessional. During my first week of a laboratory rotation, my advisor would look at my nails more than my eyes while we were having conversation. They would ask to simply watch me “do stuff” (pipette, section tissue for imaging, etc) and while it is completely normal for them to evaluate my performance at the bench, I had to confront them to ask if they had concerns about my ability to perform tasks based on their hyper awareness of my talons. They claimed that they were in awe of how shiny they were… True or not, I could feel that they were looking for an error that is a product of an ever so classic french tip. I admit that I have been drawn to a slightly shorter Monday to Friday length, but I know that I am far less dextrous with short nails than the converse. 

Most importantly, acrylics that click clack are essential to the hot gworl starter pack and I have no plans to forfeit mine anytime soon. A sister of mine modeled the importance of showing up as your ENTIRE self to work. You can’t just leave the parts that provoke speculation behind: tattoos, piercings, bright-colored hair… some of us don’t even bring our personalities to work. There is already enough fatigue from diluting solutions from 50X to 1X or learning to operate a 2-photon microscope that I literally can’t afford to lose the cognitive resources required to suppress my identity. There are endless external factors that do this for us already. I invite the reader to reflect on any box you have been put in and decide if you want to stay in it. And if you don’t have time for all of that, then take this anecdote as the origin story for my logo.

Cheers, 

Stef