At Marc Jacobs’ winter 2026 New York Fashion Week show, every single model walked the runway with bare nails. 

No polish, no extensions, nothing. Just short, groomed, buffed. 

And apparently, his manicurist was told to cut them down five minutes before the show started. 

Five minutes. 

Which means this wasn’t a mood board decision or a last-minute oversight. Someone actively chose to undo the nails right before showtime. That’s a statement.

Well, they have just… stopped getting nail appointments altogether.

Okay, here’s a concept I want you to sit with for a second, because it explains a lot of what’s happening in culture right now, not just with nails.

Counter-signalling is when people who are already at the top of a social hierarchy deliberately stop doing the thing that signals status, precisely because they don’t need to signal anymore. 

The term comes from economics and game theory but the Internet ran with it and honestly, it tracks perfectly once you see it.

Think about it this way. When logo-maxed out outfits first became a thing, wearing them loudly was the point. It said: I can afford this. Then, at some point, the people who had always been able to afford it started going quiet. No logos. Just really, well tailored plain white shirts, muted colours, crisp tailoring.

Basically, quiet luxury. Because they had nothing to prove and everyone who needed to know, already knew. My friend, that’s counter-signalling. 

It’s the rich guy who shows up to the party in a plain white T-shirt while everyone else is dressed up. It’s the CEO who drives a ten-year-old car. 

It’s giving Marc Jacobs cutting his models’ nails five minutes before a show.

We saw it with loud bags. We saw it with obvious logo-maxed luxury. And now, we are watching it happen in real time with the perfect gel set.

Accessibility Did What It Always Does

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about status symbols. They stop working the moment everyone has them. 

Gel nails went from being aspirational to a Tuesday errand so fast that the appointment itself became unremarkable. 

Your building’s receptionist gets them done now. 

And the moment something becomes that accessible, the charm honestly fades away. 

The people who set taste quietly move on, without making an announcement about it.

Remember, when we became really big on Labubus. Yeah, I spotted one as a keychain at Lajpat Nagar Market just yesterday. 

And slowly, science arrived too. Right on cue, to give everyone else a reason.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ8CuVrmOCK/

The EU recently banned a chemical found in gel polish, classifying it as a reproductive toxin. The UV lamps used to cure your gel have been linked to long-term skin damage with repeated exposure. 

So, while fashion opted out on instinct first. Science handed the rest of us a permission slip. 

And honestly, both things happening at the same time is rarely a coincidence.

I Did It Twice, and I Knew Immediately

I want to be honest here because the story demands it.

I got my nails done for the first time in July 2022 as a birthday week treat to myself. It was a deep burgundy colour with oval shaped nails. 

I honestly loved it for the first few days. It felt effortless, I felt pretty. I had to massage a pea-sized amount of hand cream, when on the contrary even if I dipped it in oil, my hands would look like they came out of a coal mine. 

So, I understood the appeal completely. 

Until I tried to type. Then I shampooed my hair and spent a full minute untangling strands from between the nail and the nail bed, which, if you have never experienced this, is exactly as irritating as it sounds. 

That was it for me. It wasn’t even a philosophical objection to the whole thing.

It was just: this is making my life actively worse and I don’t know why I am doing it.

So I stopped, told myself I was simply not a nail person, and quietly filed it away under things that weren’t for me. I couldn’t survive my gorgeous, burgundy nails for even a week. It irritated me how my nail bed was peeking through around the cuticles as my nails grew longer. 

I quietly went to the nail bar and got them to file it away. 

Instead, now I opt for milky options, or get one of those bare nail kits. My favourites are particularly, the Chanel Le Vernis Longwear Nail Polish in Ballerina and the Opi Nail Envy Nail Strengthener in Bubble Bath.

 

It has this barely there finish that makes my hands look like I get a manicure every three days. 

Which is why, when a Valeria Lipovetsky reel crossed my feed, the one where she talks about quitting her manicures and realising she had only been going out of habit, that skipping appointments had freed up 90 minutes per visit and cleared actual space in her calendar, I felt something I can only describe as retroactive vindication. 

Not surprise. Relief, TBH.

The kind you feel when a trend finally catches up to what your gut already knew.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXuaEe6CHCH/

What We Were Actually Performing

And here’s what I realised, it was never really about the nail appointment. Heck, it wasn’t even about the nails.

It was about the visible evidence of upkeep. The chip-free set, the regular booking, the time and money you spent maintaining it. 

These were signals that said: I am the kind of person who has herself together in ways that show up on her hands. So easily, and of course so effortlessly. 

All while making the digits look decorative.

What’s changing now is the direction of the signal. 

Effortlessness is the new proof of arrival. 

Now I have the time and money for this but I have so little to prove that I cut them down five minutes before the show. 

That’s a much harder thing to fake, which is exactly why it works.

The question isn’t really whether nail appointments are over. It’s what it says about us that we spent so long performing something we weren’t even sure we wanted, just waiting for someone at the top to say we could stop.

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