Bare Nails Trend Exposes Class Divisions in Beauty Standards

Paloma Buddemeier has noticed something peculiar happening at her London nail salon. Customers arrive with a specific request: make their nails look untouched. They still sit for the full treatment—filing, buffing, cuticle work, hydration—but leave with no polish. What they're chasing is bare nails, a trend that has flooded social media, dominated fashion runways, and become shorthand for "quiet luxury," that aspirational aesthetic of understated wealth.

On the surface, it reads as liberation. Some women describe ditching regular manicures as an escape from an exhausting beauty routine, a rebellion against the expectation that femininity requires constant maintenance. Irish TV presenter Angela Scanlon became an unlikely spokesperson for the movement when she stopped her twice-monthly salon visits—a habit she'd picked up in New York in the 2000s, where manicures felt as mandatory as washing hair. She posted about the decision on Substack and Instagram, and it resonated. At New York Fashion Week in February, designers like Marc Jacobs sent models down the runway with unpolished nails. Beauty magazines declared the trend official: "All The Cool Girls Are Quietly Quitting Manicures." "Bare Nails Are the New Status Symbol." "Manicures Are No Longer Classy."

But beneath this narrative of simplification lies something more complicated. Critics argue the trend is not innocent—it is, in fact, a textbook example of how beauty standards perpetuate class divisions and erase cultural identity. Kristina Rodulfo, a beauty journalist, points out that the framing of bare nails as elegant and tasteful relies on language that has historically been used to enforce white supremacist standards of beauty. The problem is not bare nails themselves, but the suggestion that they represent a higher form of taste than the bold, colorful manicures that Black, Latino, and Asian communities pioneered and have long used as a form of self-expression and cultural affirmation.

Nail art's roots run deep. In 13th-century Imperial China, long nails and brass shields protecting them signaled a life free from manual labor—a marker of status. In the 1800s, the number of layers of rose-tinted salve a woman wore communicated her virtue or lack thereof. But it was women of color who transformed manicures into an accessible and powerful form of self-presentation. Josephine Baker, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, and Olympic sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner—whose dramatic acrylic sets sometimes overshadowed her record-breaking performances—all used nail art as a way to express femininity and beauty at times when that expression was difficult for Black women to claim. When Vietnamese refugees established nail bars in the 1970s, professional manicures moved beyond the wealthy and became democratic.

Then the cycle turned. As manicures became more accessible to the masses, the wealthy began moving away from them—a phenomenon known as "counter signalling." The same logic that made logo bags seem gauche and quiet luxury aspirational now makes bare nails the marker of taste. The irony, as fashion historian Suzanne E. Shapiro notes, is that bare nails are not actually natural. They require their own grooming, their own costly salon services. Some of Buddemeier's clients now book hours-long appointments to have technicians build hyper-realistic fake nails in sheer, glossy neutrals—the bare look, manufactured.

For some, the shift is driven by economics. Emmanuella, a Londoner, has pivoted to bare nails partly because of rising costs of living. A 25-year-old told the BBC that manicures now feel wasteful—an hour spent in a salon when she could be at the gym, risking a broken nail and wasted money. Others, like Khadija, genuinely prefer minimalism and the ethos of self-care over consumerism. But celebrity nail artist Celeste Hampton expresses sadness at how trends have become weaponized. "We're taking the fun out of nails," she says. "Anyone should be able to wear what they like—nail polish or bare nails. Why is there an argument?"

The nail industry itself has been largely female-run and female-owned since its modern inception, and for many women it has felt empowering. Yet the current framing of bare nails as the ultimate status symbol risks undoing that. It risks telling women of color that the creative, colorful expressions they pioneered are now tacky, that taste and class belong to those who wear nothing at all. Scanlon, who started the conversation, seems bemused by how it has evolved. "It's not that deep," she says. "Some people like to have the nails done, some people don't." But in a world where beauty standards have always whispered messages about a woman's place in society, depth is exactly what the conversation carries.