Black on white

    I have discovered a striking new manicure technique. It's very eye-catching, if a little dark.

   You should all be familiar with a French manicure. Two-tone white and colour paint for your nails. Most impressive when done well.

    But what about black instead of white? A little Goth, perhaps?

    Simple to do though. Take one Rusty Old Wreck, and fit it with a new clutch. The accumulated oily grime of five decades of motoring accumulates under your nails, and like all the best quality cosmetics it has impressive sticking power.

    Damn, I'm out with my wife tomorrow evening and I don't want to be sporting black lines on my fingernails!

Manual dexterity

   Everyone has a few of those work skills you pick up as you go through life but somehow end up not needing. Some are obviously redundant, for example I can set up the convergence on a delta-gun CRT colour TV set (Really useful for those 1970s retro-tech parties I can tell you!), while others are useful but you've simply moved on, no longer doing that job.
   So here's my question: if I have the manual dexterity to hand-solder surface mount integrated circuits (<<1mm) why on earth do I have so many problems applying nail polish (>>10mm)?

Sharpening up my act

    Never having been out in the world en femme, I've never really had to bother too much about how I look. I could certainly do a lot worse, but when I'm merely cross-dressing for my own amusement it doesn't matter much if I get something a bit wrong, or maybe do something in a less-than-expert manner. All that is set to change though. If I am to show my face as girl even in the safe space of a TG support group then my presentation needs to be as faultless as I can make it in front of my peers. I'd hate for someone to look at me and think "She didn't make much effort!".
    So to that end I've been busily sharpening up my act. First to receive attention has been my weight. I'm fortunate enough to be in pretty good nick with a very active lifestyle so I wasn't in too bad shape in January, but there's always room for improvement. Someone my size can pack away an astounding quantity of food, so I've simply cut my portion sizes down to those consumed by mere mortals. Not surprisingly this has had some effect. Down from 224 pounds to 213, that's 11 pounds since January. My BMI was in the healthy range anyway, but that's got to be good. Unfortunately though it's had the effect that some clothes, both boy and girl, no longer fit me as my waist has dropped from a size UK18 somewhere in the direction of a 16. My upper body is always going to be an 18 - it's a ribcage thing - but I didn't quite expect this much change at waist level.
    It's also now a couple of months since I stopped biting my nails with the aid of the excellent Stop-n-grow. I have never posessed a set of unbitten fingernails as an adult so now I've grown them to what is for me an unfeasably long length (but is probably not very long in the scheme of things) and shaped them carefully I'm discovering just what a pain in the arse they can be as well as a relative joy to look at compared to the gnawed stumps they used to be.
    Take mobile phones for instance. People with fingernails press the buttons with them. People without fingernails use the fleshy end of their finger. I've spent a lifetime doing the latter, so I now find I'm spearing my fingernail down the gap between the keys and failing completely to text or dial as I want to. Which is probably very amusing to watch.
    It has been worth the effort. If nothing else I've lost the perpetual annoyance of pain in one finger or another where I had bitten a little too close. But I think I'm going to have to resist the urge to grow them further just because I can, and trim them back to sensible levels. Before I catch one of them in something and hurt myself.
    Finally, I've after a bit of effort and research picked a better foundation and taken the time to get a good colour match. Not having too blue a beard I flatter myself I get a good enough concealment without resorting to trowelling it on, so the Clarins everlasting foundation range does the trick and is comfortable to wear, if a little pricey. Having put both myself and my wife in stitches looking at "chestnut", a colour I can only describe as "Game show host orange" and all the colours in between to "ivory", a Goth-like pastiness, I find that I'm a "toffee". I'd always thought of myself as a mint imperial, personally.
    As I have observed before, passing is not my strong point. Someone standing on White Horse Hill could tell I'm not a GG. But at least the above effort should mean that our observer by the White Horse might have a moment of doubt if the moon wasn't shining.

Stop-n-grow rocks!

The web's an awesome place, isn't it. If you're not content with following the bedtime activities of a newlywed couple via Twitter, you can now come here to follow the fingernail growth rate of a transgendered British blogger. Does it get any better than this?

A while back I decided to get on top of my lifelong nail biting habit by applying a product called Stop-n-grow to my fingernails. This is a clear nail paint with an awful taste that reminds you to stop if the fingers end up in your mouth. Most importantly though it gives me a perfectly valid excuse as someone presenting as a bloke to practice an extravagantly femmed-up nail painting routine at work.

What can I say? It works! Every time my fingers have come anywhere near my mouth, the great taste of Bitrex has made sure they come away sharpish. I've now grown them out to the point at which they were slightly annoying before cutting and filing them back to a maintainable shape. And they're staying that way. If you've not spent decades biting your nails, you won't understand the feeling bestowed upon me by this simple achievement.

There is one unexpected downside. In the past my nail-polishing has been fairly infrequent but as a little celebration of my newly tidy nails I've done it once or twice in the last week. For now semi-decent nails are a novelty, forgive me a moment's fun. Unfortunately though I'm not used to having a fingernail under which things can get caught, so I am having to be very careful to make sure I don't have a rim of rather colourful pigment left under my nails after cleaning away the paint. I can claim to my colleagues that it's paint from my car, but a simple glance out of the window would reveal it not to be the same colour. What do I do? Only buy nail paint the same colour as my car, or simply pick up an old car of the same colour every time I buy a new shade? What a tough decision!

The magic millimetre

A very short post. 

Stop-n-grow rocks! I have just under a millimetre's unbitten nail growth in the few days since I started applying it. Last night's celebration was lilac nail polish which looked so much better than on bitten nails. 

It'll be a week or so before they're fully fixed, at that point I'll have to follow Stace's example and reach for the nail file. I must resist the temptation to let them grow to vamp proportions.

Painting my nails at work

Yesterday morning before work, I painted my nails. Some time about elevenish, sitting at my desk at work in full view of my colleagues, I painted them again. And again before going home.

Going full time? Sadly not.

All my life, I've bitten my fingernails. It's a nervous compulsion so I've found it very difficult to stop. I've now decided it's time to get serious and stop it to grow some nicer nails, so I've bought a little bottle of Stop-n-Grow "willpower in a bottle", clear nail paint with an awful taste. It's water soluble and it needs reapplying after hand washing, so the best bit is that even presenting as a full-on bloke I can perfectly legitimately be seen regularly doing my nails.

I succumbed to the temptation to shamelessly femme up the process in the finest tradition of bored receptionists everywhere to see just how much I could get away with. 

Damn that stuff tastes gross!