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Manicurist Dreams
"If you ask me, I'll tell you it's a great career."
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By Alyssa Wagner
Youth Radio sent us a story for our series, “Starting Over” that’s a bit different from the stories we’ve been telling about adults reinventing themselves and their jobs later in life. This story takes us back to a pivotal time in adolescence when many “dream jobs” get pushed aside. Youth Radio’s Alyssa Wagner has the beginnings of a lucrative career as a manicurist. But she reveals what happens when your ambitions don’t fit the expectations of your parents and society.
ALYSSA
I have a gift, so to speak. I do nails, but not normal nails, I take it to a whole new level. I have done designs ranging from little flowers to the Cuban flag.
And if you ask me, I’ll tell you it’s a great career. I’ve already raised three hundred dollars for a high school fundraiser doing manicures, while my friends couldn’t make half that washing cars.
Whenever my friends come over, they almost always ask me to do their nails. We watch movies while I cut cuticles, pummis, moisturize and then design.
My parents think it’s cute and cool, until I start talking about it seriously as a job. They never would have thought that nails would be the direction I would take. Sure, my dad knows about the spa craze and the growing number of open metrosexuals you know, urban guys who take cosmetics seriously…
DAD (on tape)
But that doesn’t keep me from also thinking that the world of nails itself is kind of a dead end second choice kind of thing.
ALYSSA
So if right now I decided to stop all my college applications and go to beauty school, how would you feel about that?
DAD
Well, I won’t really know if you want to do that because you want to go to beauty school, or you’re getting frightened of going to college.
ALYSSA
Sure I’m scared of college, but it has nothing to do with why I started considering a career as a manicurist. My love of nails started way before my fear of the future.
My mom’s more blunt than my dad. So higher education is not negotiable.
MOM (on tape)
There’s no rational reason. You just, you just, it’s just what you do. And the more education you have, the better.
ALYSSA
So this is a situation where it would not be good for me to go against the grain and be my own person, instead of doing what’s expected of me by society?
MOM
Oh PA-LEEZ! Yet, you’re right, absolutely correct., correct. You HAVE to go to college. One does. That’s all there is to it. Your life will not be complete. You’ll regret probably the rest of your life.
ALYSSA
But who could regret this?
I’d rather learn about the science of cuticle care from my manicurist Emily than go sit in lectures about ancient history.
MANICURIST (on tape)
Cuticles…there is- cuticles create the seal between your nail and your toe so that you don’t get infections. So that nothing can get inside. You don’t need as much of it as it grows…that’s what you trim off. Oh yeah, you have to learn about all the lovely diseases and things like that at the school.
ALYSSA
You mean like fungus?
MANICURIST
Fungus, and there’s actually one that I’ve never seen before, but actually it causes the cuticle to grow up over the nail. And it’s just…
ALYSSA
From my point of view, Emily has the greatest job in the world. I see no flaw in this line of work. The best part of pursuing this career is that later in life, I wouldn’t feel like I wished my hobby was my profession. My dad went through that. He’s a professor, but at my age, what he really wanted he wanted was to be an artist or writer…
DAD (on tape)
And I know my Dad said “well you’ll never make a living at either of those”. And I think I said something like “well, I don’t think that’s necessarily true”, but something sort of tipped over in my head, and I did feel like that he raised a legitimate concern. I mean it did give me second thoughts.
ALYSSA
Now, decades later, my dad’s started adding art and writing to his job, trying to return to his first love. I’m not sure what will happen to me whether I’ll be a doctor pining to do nails, or a manicurist wishing to study health. But whatever I do, I plan to be wearing open-toe sandals while I do it! In Berkeley, I’m Alyssa Wagner for Marketplace.
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