Confessions of a fashion writer

A bottle of black polish landed on my desk today.

Super shiny. Super black.

Black is the trendy shade of the moment, which I wrote about recently in the Sunday Living section, and as much as I want to embrace dark nails, I just can’t give in to black polish.

Dark polish is a nice change from summer’s lighter shades of pale, plus it’s an inexpensive and easy way to look current while letting everyone know you follow the trends but aren’t a slave to them. Plenty of women are sporting short dark nails and most of them look oh-so modern.

Me, I’m still wearing pastel pink.

I can’t stand chips and when dark polish starts to wear, it looks really ugly, really tacky. I want to go dark, but if I do I’ll constantly be staring at my nails, looking for the first telltale sign of a chip — and with my luck it would probably show up in a day or two. Then I wouldn’t be able to get that polish off fast enough.

Even as I write this I notice that my nails are in need of a little attention.

The nail polish looks less than fresh and upon closer inspection I can see that the pale color is starting to wear at the tips.