Nail-biting finishes

Now there is another stylistic tic that would have been unthinkable on a propah lady. Since the era of the skull print scarf, having streaked, chipped or just plain grotty nail polish no longer suggests drug addiction, manual labour or pure laziness. Like untied high-tops, thread-worn jeans and bedhead, it’s now part of a deliberate look.

Chipped polish is sported by nail-biting school students, downtown punkers; it has been spotted uptown, in professional settings and gala parties, behind department store sales counters and even (gasp!) on beauty and fashion industry insiders.

“Before, when nail polish was chipped you absolutely had to run and get it fixed,” said Ji Baek, the owner of Rescue Beauty Lounge who has noticed the Olsens and Lindsay Lohan with less-than-impeccable polish. Now, clients are “wearing perfectly-tailored clothes, they have $5,000 bags and equally fabulous shoes, but their nails are chipped and they’re saying, ‘I don’t care.’ “

But, she noted, their polish “is so perfectly chipped.”

Still, it’s hard to know where to draw the line. Are chipped nails appropriate for everyone? For a job interview? A date? A wedding?

Joanne Cruz, a clothing designer wrote in an e-mail message: “There are times when I let my nails chip — it looks kinda cool.”

But Ms. Cruz noted that she would never go on a date with less-than-perfect polish.

Kerry Diamond, a vice president for public relations at Lancôme, has watched grungy nails move from models to mainstream. Recently, a 20-something woman came to her, “beautifully dressed, Goyard bag, Louboutin shoes” with extremely chipped fire-engine-red nails. “She had definitely been wearing nail polish for two weeks,” Ms. Diamond said, distinctly unhorrified. “For this younger generation, the grooming rules are different.”

And for people like Ms. Diamond and Ms. Cruz, instead of signifying manual labour, chipped nails may now connote professional fabulousness.

“It’s not easy on your nails when you’re BlackBerrying all the time,” Ms. Diamond said. Sending the message that your life is much too complex, darling, to bother with maintaining a manicure is exactly the point, said Michelle Markowitz, an aspiring actress. She likes less-than-perfect nails “because it shows you don’t really care.”

But it’s really not appropriate for a job interview, said Lorri Zelman, the president of the Human Resources Association of New York. “If somebody wants to nail an interview, they should have a certain level of conservatism,” she said.

Still Jessica Brand, a manager of bed-and-breakfasts in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, also lets her polish fade away. “I don’t think it’s permissible, but I don’t care,” she said. Her friend Amel Ouassel, a French-born interior decorator living in Manhattan, was even more blasé. “It’s not the end of the world,” she said, as she snuck a cigarette—¿ with flaking black-over-dark red nail— ¿ in the garden at a party at MoMA.

“A girl with skinny jeans and a great bag looks like she did it on purpose,” said Deborah Lippman, a manicurist who has worked on the hands of Gwyneth Paltrow, Mary J. Blige and Madonna.

Does this mean that we will be seeing a wave of moms and grandmas with punk rock nails? “I don’t think you can get away with if you’re a woman of a certain age,” she said. What’s a certain age?

“Anybody over 35,” she replied.

There is another caveat to consider. Chipped toenail polish is still, uniformly, a never-never. Ms. Baek summed it up in one word: “Gross.”
-MELENA RYZIK