Marcin Polak
THE POWER OF HYBRIDS IN QUANTUM COSMETOLOGY

A combination of two options, two types of polish, two styles – regular polish and light‑cured polish: an amalgam of them is the very hybrid that bonds with the fingernail for a long time, at least until the nail regrows completely, if not longer. The durability of hybrid polish is an advantage. Regular nail polish lasts up to three days before it begins to chip, while hybrid nail varnish must be taken off. How is it applied? First, the nail is prepared. This is done with a drill, which is also used later on to remove the gel polish. The dust released during the removal is a disadvantage when using a drill. To avoid inhaling the dust, one should wear a dust mask while working with it. But let us return to the preparation of the nail. Once the nail is clean, so‑called base coat is applied – a layer that provides reinforcement to the nail. Once the base coat has set, having been cured under a UV lamp, a coloured gel polish is applied – twice or thrice if it is clear; there are different types of gel varnish: clear, glossy, matte and glitter). After both layers are cured under a UV lamp, a top coat, also known as a glossy top coat, is applied. The exposure time for each layer of gel polish ranges from 45 seconds to one minute, depending on the wattage of the lamp. As mentioned above, a drill is used to remove the gel polish but it can also be wiped off with a cotton pad after soaking the nails in acetone. This method brings to light another drawback of gel polish (the first being harmful dust). It can be easily cleaned off with a cotton ball provided that the nails are first soaked in acetone for ten to fifteen minutes. This relatively long time of exposure to acetone can lead to burns, although in most cases, especially in young people who tend to recover quickly, it only causes redness of the skin around the nail.¹ Allergenic substances in hybrid nail polishes are a separate issue. Recent cosmetology research conducted at the Department of Experimental Dermatology and Cosmetology of the Jagiellonian University Medical College leaves no doubt. Nail varnishes currently available on the market, manufactured by fifteen different cosmetic companies, were tested; here are the findings: “Potentially sensitizing substances are used in the production of hybrid lacquers. The most common substances from the group of acrylates with allergenic properties in the analyzed hybrid lacquers are 2‑Hydroxyethyl Methacrylate (2‑HEMA), 2‑Hydroxypropyl Methacrylate (2‑HPMA) and Ethylene glycol dimethylacrylate (EGDMA). From the group of dyes are CI 47000 (Quinoline Yellow) and CI 19140 (FD&C Yellow 5). The analysis showed the presence of dyes not allowed for use in cosmetics and those that should not be included in hybrid varnishes.”² Even so, hybrid nail varnishes keep enjoying continued (in fact, growing) popularity.

From claws to nails

Animals have claws. “Not only do we distinguish the animal by its claws”, wrote Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “but it distinguishes itself essentially thereby, it defends itself, it preserves itself.”³ Claws, like fangs, are weapons in primeval wilderness. It is obvious that the animal world is all about fangs and claws. Hegel once more: “But for the special determination, a correct instinct has hit upon taking the distinguishing characteristics of the species also from the teeth, claws, and the like, i.e. from the animal’s weapons; for it is through these that the animal itself establishes and preserves itself as an independent existence, that is, distinguishes itself from others.”⁴

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (like Aristotle before him in his Zoology) gave an account of what he saw with the naked eye, weaving these common‑sense observations into his concept of being. The same method was employed by most exponents of philosophical empiricism because, prior to the invention of the scientific method and its technological apparatus, scientists were usually philosophers or persons who provided answers to general questions by using logic and personal experience. Modern science, however, facilitates more precise observations, mediated by complex falsifiable theories, and therefore allows for more reliable conclusions about the history of claws, especially regarding the evolutionary transition from claws to nails. According to recent primatological research, the evolution of nails appears to be linked to changes in primate locomotion, the shift from climbing large trunks and branches, where claws provided excellent grip, to leaning on smaller twigs and shoots, made possible by the development of broad fingertips and epidermal ridges (fingerprints). The transition from claw to nail is likely to have occurred at the same time.⁵

It could be roughly said that the human (Homo habilis) came to be with the fingernails. The emergence of fingernails was possibly unrelated to humans’ growing in gentleness as compared with the primates that had come before them in the course of evolution; rather, the aggression of Homo habilis was mediated by the inventions made possible by the development of the brain and hands. Two and a half million years ago, the first humans inhabiting the Turkana Basin on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia began to think and tinker, inventing tools which they subsequently used – in place of fangs and claws – in the struggle for survival. In this way, Homo habilis made the first step on the path that took humans out of direct animality to a humanism mediated culturally in multiple ways.⁶ The Palaeolithic origins of humanism lie in the replacement of claws with sticks and hand axes. Over the next centuries, hominids’ creative skills kept progressing, resulting in the development of many sophisticated forms of scratching and tearing until increasingly numerous human societies witnessed the emergence of complex legal measures, economic law, high‑interest mortgages, debt collection agencies, jails and the legally sanctioned death penalty.

The transition from an animal to a human world was not, therefore, a transition from natural wilderness – an arena for the struggle for existence, to a land of gentleness – to claim so would be an exaggeration considering the cruelty, both mercenary and not, of which humans are capable and which they systematically, every now and then, indulge in here and there across the globe, but, to put it fairly simply, it could be said that the transition from the animal world to the human one was a transition from claws to nails… and on, into the realm of nail art aesthetics.

The transformation of natural nails into hybrid ones was made possible by the development of biotechnology and the emergence of hybrids. As mentioned above, the original function of claws was to facilitate the efficient climbing of trees and, naturally, they were also used for hunting, carrying out attacks, chasing, putting up defence and making escape. They were functional and made sense pragmatically, and so did fangs used for inflicting death and tearing apart prey. Today, fangs and claws are but a distant memory in the human world, though they do appear here and there as artificial substitutes. Hybrid nail extensions, implants and dentures pay scant regard to pragmatic considerations because it is the aesthetic sense that comes to the fore, especially in the case of nails. Claws have lost their evolutionary purpose, being no longer needed in the fight for survival. Teeth, though, continue to tear and crush the flesh of prey which does not happen during a successful hunt but at mealtimes at home, in the street, in a bar or restaurant. Still, the practical function of teeth has been preserved; whether the same can be said about nails, especially extra long nail extensions, seems doubtful. Gel extensions severely restrict the use of hands. Daily performance of practical activities related to maintaining cleanliness, hygiene or operating basic appliances, becomes problematic. These nails are haute couture, colloquially referred to as “claws” or “talons” in the beauty industry, terms that evoke atavistic associations with the animal world. It is not manual dexterity that haute couture nails are supposed to improve; on the contrary, their sole aim is to compel attention and admiration, allowing the person wearing them to move up the social ladder. They are a sign of someone exceptional, someone who stands out from the crowd and who is, for some reason, exempt from daily duties. Thus, long nails are not only tiny artworks, miniature paintings or sculptures, but also constitute an indicator of social class. In ancient China, emperors grew fingernails to show and stress more or less the same thing – their high position in the social hierarchy or, more precisely, their divine or superhuman aspect; this can be seen, for example, in the hand‑coloured etching, made by James Gillray in London on 14 September 1792, that depicts the Chinese Emperor Qianlong (乾隆皇帝) with long claw‑like nails, smoking a long pipe and blowing smoke with a somewhat insulting expression on his face, while granting an audience to English envoys.⁷

Long nails imply that we are dealing with a being that possesses divine attributes and, as a result, indicate their transcendence in relation to mundane needs. Everyday activities, hygienic practices included, pose no problem to a person with long nails because they do not need to perform them; this is so due to their superhuman or quasi‑divine nature. Phantasms of godhood are closely associated with belonging to the upper classes, rulers, billionaires and celebrities. Nowadays, gel nail extensions have become widespread. In the global village interconnected via the internet, dreams of rising above the ordinary through nail extensions are common. Unfortunately for those harbouring these dreams, they come true quite easily – even a person living on a minimum wage can afford a gel manicure from time to time; this means that colourful “claws” make so many people stand out from the rest that this apparent rise must be, due to the large numbers of beneficiaries, illusory. Anyone can be special and that being so, no one is. For this reason, a contrary minimalistic trend can sometimes be observed in nail art, a shift towards traditional elegance, or an escape forwards in the form of extreme body modifications (to be discussed in more detail with “B‑boy”). Either way, this cosmetic hybrid is enjoying its golden age in the world of nail art. The most exaggerated and extravagant forms acquire the status of art (some minimalist forms do as well). What matters is the skill, precision and beauty of execution or, as always, téchne (τέχνη), which can be seen at nail art festivals where artists use gels, hybrid polishes and airbrushes to turn fingernails into never‑before‑seen aesthetic artefacts.⁸

Fangs

Hybrid dentures replacing missing teeth have been a standard dental treatment for twenty years, although the materials used have changed. For example, about fifteen years ago, zirconia frames started being used instead of porcelain ones, allowing for smaller and better‑fitting dentures and decreasing the likelihood of chipping, experienced by patients with porcelain ones. Dental materials and technology continue to be developed, driven by the widespread societal demand for health, comfort and the most beautiful smile possible. None of this was available in the Palaeolithic Period, these things are quite new (aesthetic medicine emerged in France in the 1970s), but they show considerable potential – here is a field of medicine that prioritises aesthetic motivation. Performatively, this is corroborated by such Hollywood stars as Mickey Rourke, Sylvester Stallone, Brad Pitt, and many others. While claims to divinity or being better than the rest are more difficult to verify in the case of nails than teeth, aesthetic motivation is undoubtedly present in dentistry as well. While aiming to achieve good shade matching between artificial enamel and natural teeth colour or skin tone is an important cosmetic consideration in prosthetics, the dental market has also been flooded with dental jewellery, overlays and dental stickers – gold, diamond or silver. It seems that teeth are increasingly losing their biting function and becoming something to show off, elevating humans from being an animal struggling for existence to being a god with no need or desire for anything except being an object of admiration. Nail and dental cosmetics have become part of a broad tendency towards the aesthetisation of life, with various artists presenting small, yet often exquisite, works of art in those areas. It is true that health‑related motivations still play a prominent role in dentistry, but one should also consider the case of Marcel Ribeiro, better known as “B‑boy” de Souza Ribeiro, who underwent a fairly extreme transformation of his appearance, including hand splitting surgery and having metal teeth inserted, including supernaturally long canines.⁹ Beyond such radical transformations, which are still rare, dental aesthetics usually involves applying various adornments to teeth.

“Claws” at work

As the nails grow, so does the distance to the usefulness of the hand. Or, to put it more bluntly, the longer the nails, the greater the distance to work. By significantly lengthening one’s fingernails, one enters the realm of uselessness. The extravagant aesthetic of nail art becomes a component in the protest against the compulsion to work. Anyone with long and elaborate nails performs a repetition of Guy Debord’s words: “Never work!”¹⁰ Situationism is now nothing more than a memory of May 1968, but situations of pure life, of drifting beyond the labour organisation system in the capitalist society in its current form, have not disappeared but become fleeting or, more precisely, quantum occurrences.¹¹ In other words, situationist freedom exists as ostentatious detachment from, and unrelatedness to, the realm of organised labour, in the same way that various energy states in quantum theory have nothing in common. It ought to be remembered that these states are observer‑dependent; Schrödinger’s cat, as long as it remains sealed within a box and unseen, is simultaneously living and dead. The same applies to any object, including an employee confined within a corporate box who is at once a human being, woman, man, father, mother, sick, healthy – depending on how they are looked at. The observer’s eye possesses quasi‑divine qualities, making the existence of an object dependent on the act of observation. The situation is not unlike the philosophy of Irish bishop George Berkeley who reduced the existence of the world to God’s act of observing (esse = percipi) his own thoughts. Either God knows what it takes to be useless in a society of workers, or it can be explained in reference to the quantum theory: Schrödinger’s office worker is simultaneously a living being (one that dreams, desires, fantasises and goes through all sorts of experiences) and a function in the flow of capital, an office operator required to perform clearly defined tasks within the workflow.

How then can one respond to freedom’s call and escape the system of labour control and capital flow in today’s highly computerised and organised society? There are two ways to do that: the first (fairly popular and common) is to grow fingernails and – as in quantum superposition – work and, at the same time, demonstrate one’s situation outside the constraints of the work order, corporate or otherwise; the second is to be sufficiently highly positioned within Debord’s society of the spectacle, possessing enough capital to never work. However, the paradox about the latter method is that people who can afford not to work to earn their living because they have sufficient capital reserves to support themselves are prone to the fear of losing them and, as a result, they either shut themselves off, becoming prisoners in a golden cage, or, like Prince Gautama, they buddy up with the people in the guise of an ordinary person, which leads to another superposition: they want to be perceived as common working people, essentially out of fear of being robbed (this is where the analogy with Prince Gautama ends), and, in a sense, they are ordinary citizens or, in any case, they do their best to come across as such in the eyes of observers in order to gain a sense of security (Gautama’s disguise was to offer him an undistorted view and let him discover the truth about suffering), yet, at the same time, they are not ordinary citizens because they have their reserves to fall back on and do not need to work. The superposition in this case is that they are at once living people with a whole range of experiences, millionaires transcending the world of work, and ordinary people whom they pose as in front of others out of concern for their own safety.

Short and elegant hybrid fingernails are not only chosen by adherents of aesthetic minimalism, but are a hallmark of the queer community as well, this not being, of course, a rule without exceptions.¹²

Queer and fetishes

Hybrids do trigger objections sometimes and it is the chaos‑invoking juxtaposition of multiple principles considered incompatible for centuries that causes protestations. It should be pointed out, however, that chimeras, precedential hybrids, were found already in ancient and medieval myths and decorative grotesques. Art movements with hybrid overtones¹³ include surrealism (representations of fantastic chimeras accompanied by realistic elements), conceptualism (subordination of material objects to concepts), Dadaism, ready‑mades and arte povera (the use of ordinary objects in high art). Hybridity is also to be found in anthropological models originating in various traditions. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, there is a hybrid model of the soul as a two‑horse chariot and a charioteer.¹⁴ The Banquet, on the other hand, features the mythical figure of the “androgyne” – a hybrid of a female and a male.¹⁵ The Christian division of human into body and soul, derived from Platonism, is also dualistic in nature, representing a fusion of two different kinds of substances. Later on, modern philosophers pondered on the interaction of these different principles, or even their very combination, given that one is material and the other immaterial. This is a proper anthropological question, known as the mind‑body problem in Anglo‑Saxon literature. Sigmund Freud also formulated some diverse principles in the anthropological model he devised. In one of the two topologies of human nature he proposed, there are the “it,” “I” and “over‑I.” While “I” and “over‑I” are to some extent similar in nature, the “it,” being irrational and instinctual, is distinctly different.¹⁶ The hybridisation of Freudianism becomes more intense in postmodernism, primarily due to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s writings that challenge Freud’s ideas: Anti‑Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus contain an expansion of principles and an escalation of nominalism, shifting the focus onto the singularity and multiplicity of the principles that determine human life. Around this time, after May 1968, the queer movement emerged and began to spread as a social process of deconstructing traditional norms, enabling people to transcend traditional categories of gender and sexual orientation.

From a psychosexual perspective, hybrid fingernails first of all elevate the nail as a fetish. Hybrid varnish gives a glossier finish than traditional varnishes, and when it is applied to a large surface, which is made possible by gel base coats, it can sometimes produce a quasi‑magical effect. Airbrush experts can paint intricate images on nails like this, but even shiny single‑colour nails act as perfect fetishes, sparking off associations with primeval claws covered in blood that suggest sexually appealing ferocity or, conversely, calling up associations with precious gems or crystals, thus acquiring a superhuman and even celestial quality¹⁷ (in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the ninth sphere of heaven is called the “crystal heaven”), transcending their status as a psychosexual fetish or enriching it with magical and religious aspects.

The popularity of the concept of fetish in psychiatry and sexology sprung from Alfred Binet’s study Fetishism in Love (1992 [1887]) in which he emphasised the similarity between the primal cult of objects and human sexual behaviour. “Metonymy rules sexual fetishism – sexual desire felt for a given person is transferred onto an object/fetish that remains in a more or less tangible relationship with that person (part of the → body, clothing). For Binet, fetishism as such was not a disorder – he pointed out that «a certain dose of fetishism occurs in a most normal love» (he called it «small fetishism»; Binet 1992: 126), and it is only extreme fetishism («great fetishism»), when a fetish entirely takes the place of and obscures the person, that is a pathological condition.”¹⁸

Regardless of the kind of motivation behind nail art – aesthetic, fetishistic or identity‑defining – it indisputably represents the most common form of decorating the human body. Technological progress, including the emergence of hybrid nail varnishes and airbrushes, has provided tools that have given this field of cosmetology to the status of art (nail art). In other words, the shaping and decorating of nails is an artistic practice that opens up a vast field for invention, while the classification of nail art as applied art is questionable as the result of adorning them transfers the fingernails, and with them the hands and their owner, to the realm of divine uselessness, which is the realm of art itself. Of course, the boundary between usefulness and uselessness is fluid here, depending on the form of specific pieces, the intention behind their creation, and a whole range of related practices. In a quantum age, nail polish hybrids in cosmetology represent a new facet of the relationship between technology, art, divinity and daily life.