I have been known to bite my nails in times of stress, and I got my first professional manicure at age 36. So this year, as I prepared for a new role at The New York Times, the state of my fingernails remained pretty much the last thing on my mind.
In need of a change, I decided to leave the newspaper’s Investigations desk in New York City and move to the International desk in London to help cover the war in Ukraine. Before I left, Adrienne Carter, The Times’s Europe editor, told me about her first visit to Kyiv last year. Almost every woman she met, she said, had amazing nails, despite the fact that they were living amid air-raid sirens and power outages.
“I’ll do that nails story,” I told her. “That’s totally in my wheelhouse.”
It’s the sort of bravado one typically shows a new boss. Still, I was confident. I may not have known the best way to push back a cuticle, and I had never been to Russia or Ukraine, but I had covered war. Most notably, I chronicled the war in Afghanistan for The Chicago Tribune for more than five years.
And I knew the war stories I liked to tell: not just those of soldiers on the front lines, but ones about people adjusting to adversity while living their everyday lives. I like to write about women and children, and how the very act of living as normally as possible can be its own kind of protest during a conflict.
These stories, I believe, can help create empathy. Not everyone understands the importance of a 155-millimeter shell in Ukraine, or battlefield movements that can sometimes feel as bloodless as a game of Risk. But slice-of-life stories — about manicures, or finding love, during wartime — may make readers think about what it would be like if war were to suddenly upend their lives.
When I arrived in Ukraine for the first time in July, the nails article was one on a list of stories I wanted to pursue. But I almost felt embarrassed by it, for two reasons: One, I had to tell local journalists, or fixers, who spend much of their time interviewing soldiers with my colleagues on the front lines, that I needed them to take me to nail salons. The assignment did not feel particularly hard-core. And two, I knew what I would face in the salons: scrutiny over the lack of effort I had put into my own appearance, as I juggled working and moving overseas.
Everywhere I went, I took note of women’s nails. There was the blue crocodile-skin pattern painted on the nails of the waitress who cheerfully served me gnocchi at Zigzag, a restaurant in Kyiv. And there was the perfect French manicure on the government official who had helped supervise the digging of mass graves near Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that had been devastated in the early weeks of Russia’s invasion. Then there was a 12-year-old who sported acrylic tan-and-black nails, each more than an inch long, while starring in a play; they looked like talons, as if one could gut a fish in a single swipe.
Even the women in the mines and on the front lines did their nails, often with patriotic motifs. Some women had their nails painted blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag; others had designs of sunflowers, which blanket Ukraine’s fields.
Fingernails had also become a way to identify the dead. The daughter of a clinic worker who was killed by missile debris told me that her mother’s body was identified by her manicure: pink, with white polka dots.
Then I went to nail salons: the hot-pink confection that is Kukla in Kyiv; the white clinical lab of Bunny Nails in Irpin; and Profi in Bucha, which Russian soldiers had once used as a sniper’s hideaway to shoot at cars, according to the salon’s owner, Iryna Davydovych.
In each salon, women shared their war stories — of fleeing to Poland and then deciding to return home; of losing their livelihood in a missile attack. Salons, as Viktoria Gulieva, a beautician, told me, were places where women could find emotional support, both by doing something to feel better and by talking about their shared tragedies.
The salons provided intimate spaces where we were free to discuss the women’s personal stories. They felt comfortable, probably because everybody on the reporting team — the fixer, the photographer and me — were women.
I tried to hide my neglected nails by holding my notebook with the cover concealing one hand, and by taking notes in a way that shielded the other. Still, at Profi, Ms. Davydovych, whose husband is still on the front lines, offered me a treatment.
“I can help you,” she told me.
And that, I guess, is what I was left with: No one really cared about the state of my nails, but salon workers did worry about what those nails said about how I was faring in Ukraine.
Just before my article came out, Dzvinka Pinchuk, the article’s main fixer, wrote to me that she had recently been in Pokrovsk, a strategically important town that Russian troops are threatening to overrun in eastern Ukraine. One woman was preparing to flee but in her spare time was trying to find a nail master.
She finally found one who could squeeze her in a week later.
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