Nail fetish!

Generally speaking, file painted nails under Inexplicable Shit Women Waste Too Much Money On. Researching for this post, I found an advice website wherein some broad had asked "what color should I paint my nails to impress a guy?" Only two out of the ten or so answers boiled down to "the dude will never notice" and that, ladies, is the only correct answer. That said, no one answered "painting your nails is dumb" which is technically even more correct. I swear, between nails and shoes and Fashion! and hair dyes and God knows what else.... The amount of time and effort and money you XX's spend on junk is astonishing. I can't even conceive of a good reason to paint my nails.
Anyway, my rant up there is entirely negated by the topic of this post which is people who are at least as into pretty nails as the average she-person, if not more so. Most folk who cared to make websites devoted to nails were really into painted nails.

But a lot of these people just like nails in general. Even plain nails. This is, somehow, even weirder.

 

This photo comes from a guy named Neville. On the page where I found the picture, he's described as a person who "you'd have no problem with walking up to and saying "hi" to" . Neville saw this lady at a bank and asked to take pictures of her nails. I think Neville is exactly the kind of person I'd have a problem walking up to and saying "hi" to.

 Different lady. She's from Moldavia, a region comprising the Republic of Moldova and a part of Romania. I knew next to nothing about Moldavia before I saw this. Moldavia is very proud that this is my first memory of Moldavia.

Some people are all about long nails. Such people are called onychophiles.

The site I found these photos on calls these sort of pictures "nailshots", a word I never knew existed. I am deeply concerned that it does.

 

Scary.

SCARY! Jesus, she looks like a fucking demon!

The sheer logistics of maintaining nails like that boggle the mind.

At least one site is devoted to men wearing fancy painted nails.

 That's a dudehand and a dudefoot there. This guy's got some pretty great links at the bottoms of his page, too (at least the one that work). For instance, you can visit the Internet home of Virginia the Toenail Queen. She's got an album:

(!!!)

Some people are into a sort of nail-fetish/BDSM crossover kind of thing where a woman scrapes her nails across someone's back.

Hm.

Like any fetish, there're a lot of ideas about how this sort of thing develops. This dude seems to think the fetish is about harking back to "a time of glamor and raw sexuality".

 "...specifically it seems like the 1960′s are of particular reverence given the societal attitudes and the blending of glamor and open sexuality. For most admirers of this fetish, it’s mostly about the whole package and the nails are just one part of it. Nail fetishists often tend to have other fetishes that are similarly tied to glamor..."

That's interesting. I think it might have something to do with evolution. The nails can show symptoms of a number of disorders, specifically some dietary deficiencies. Nice nails mean a healthy body which is attractive. This little quirk of human attraction gets exaggerated in some individuals due to genetics or weird parenting and there you go: nail fetishist.
Doesn't go too far in explaining the painted nails thing though. I wonder if painting one's nails originated in trying to cover up ugly nails, evidence of a disorder? If so, Great Job, ladies, your dumb fashion bullshit has tricked men since time immemorial into procreating with your deficient asses. Way to doom the species.