SO I’M ON AN elevator, minding my own business, when I hear a series of quick metallic clicks coming from behind me. Incongruous…yet somehow familiar. It’s the sound of fingernails being clipped! I can think of only two circumstances in which clipping one’s fingernails on an elevator might be socially acceptable: if said elevator is located in the privacy of your own bathroom, or if there actually happens to be a tiny nail salon in the rear of the elevator. “Perhaps I lack a certain devil-may-care, live-and-let-live mentality, but I don’t feel like spending the rest of the morning wondering if a stranger’s discarded pinky nail is clinging to the back of my sweater,” I complain to Mamie, my like-minded colleague. “I know,” she says. “I once witnessed a woman attempting to pluck her eyebrows while hailing a cab on Broadway.”
What’s with all this public preening? How did it get to be illegal to drive using a cell phone, yet perfectly okay to apply mascara at sixty miles an hour? Since when has riding the subway become our special time to check for black-heads—and, yes, on a particularly memorable trip to Union Square, an opportunity for one highly motivated passenger to wax her legs? Am I exaggerating? Only a select group on Manhattan’s downtown N train knows for sure. I think my friend Dave put it best when, upon witnessing a woman at the farmers’ market with an upper lip covered in Jolene cream, he posed this simple question: Are women nuts? I wanted to defend us, but there she was, plain as day, publicly bleaching her mustache while tapping a Crenshaw melon for signs of ripeness. Have we no shame? Shouldn’t there be a few guidelines where this stuff is concerned? Allow me:
- There are two schools of thought on the lipstick-at-the-dinner-table question. According to The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, “Many women instinctively reach for their lipstick at the end of a meal. Whatever you do, resist the urge.” Frankly, I can go either way on the lipstick issue. Retiring to the ladies’ room is certainly more gracious, but I’m not especially offended when someone discreetly (no liner, no blending six shades, no topcoat of gloss) touches up her lipstick as the table is being cleared. Incidentally, you may also feel free to steam open your pores using an entrée of salmon en papillote, but remember that it is never okay to follow up with toner, moisturizer, under-eye cream, Retin-A, and Restylane injections.
- Let’s say we’re at the gym and you need to borrow shampoo. Fine by me. I’ll even throw in my Frédéric Fekkai conditioner for color-treated, dry, or damaged hair. Really, go ahead and ask—but do your asking with a towel on! Here’s the deal: We change our clothes quickly in the locker room, we frolic naked leisurely in Sorority Sex Kittens Part Two.
- Which brings me to another point: You know how people are constantly saying, “Don’t be shy”? People are wrong. Be shy, be very shy. There’s a reason I did not go to medical school…okay, there are two reasons: (1) My shockingly low grades; and (2) I have absolutely no desire to do a quick mole check for you, hear the details of your yeast infection, or dig through your scalp for head lice. That’s why God invented doormen.
- I’ve attended dinners at which, so help me God, otherwise civilized women take the arrival of dessert and coffee as an opportunity to run a quick brush through their hair. Repeat after me: Pumpkin mousse and Suave Volumizing mousse do not mix.
- When out and about, please refrain from combing, brushing, blushing, pinching, poking, weaving, lining, coating, frosting, pushing, pulling, plumping, nipping and tucking. Bottom line: You look fabulous—and if you don’t, well, darling, it’s too late now. Let’s leave ourselves alone.