In “Marty Supreme,” when the lanky Ping-Pong hustler Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) phones the silk-cloaked actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) from his purloined suite at the Ritz, she flashes a manicure that’s dated even for a film set in the 1950s. As she delicately curls her hand around the rotary phone, she shows off a set of pointy nails in a searing shade of red with a creamy half-moon — a reverse French of sorts — riding the cuticle.
The undulating nail design, now called the half-moon manicure or simply the moon manicure, was on the fingers of many women in the mid-to-late ’30s.
“It wouldn’t have been called moon manicure because that was the default style,” said Suzanne E. Shapiro, the author of “Nails: The Story of the Modern Manicure.” The amplification of the lunula — the pale, crescent-shaped area at the base of the fingernail — created an elegant look that “made a well-groomed, almond-shaped nail appear longer,” as Ms. Shapiro put it.
The manicure appeared on Vogue covers throughout the mid-30s, including on a Christmas-themed 1935 issue, in which the nails displayed a curvy slice of cream, and on the June 1936 cover, where the perky crescents sat like plump, white suns on the horizon. The style was adopted by screen actresses of the time like Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong.
Great nails are seldom seen in “Marty Supreme.” Instead the film is dominated by women with hands steeped in the shtetl grime of the Lower East Side. We know they work; we know they toil. But Kay Stone’s striking yet flagrantly passé manicure alludes to her own ebbing and flowing struggles.
The moon manicure was the look du jour in the ’30s, and “Marty Supreme” is set in the ’50s. The nails are not an anachronistic mishap but a pointed nod. The character is introduced to the audience as she walks through the Ritz hotel lobby while a group of reporters discusses her fame.
“She came and went,” one says. We soon learn that the actress is preparing to make a comeback almost two decades after her heyday. To dial into that longing for the limelight, Kyra Panchenko, the movie’s makeup artist, set about reviving the démodé manicure.
People sometimes say that women keep the hair style or eyebrows from the time they felt most beautiful, Ms. Panchenko noted. “I was like, I need to bring something from her past into her character,” she said. “So that’s why I chose that.”
The fixation on the nail’s lunula dates back to Victorian days. “There’s a lot of writing about how lovely the moon is as a distinguishing feature,” Ms. Shapiro said. “The underlying significance of having a visible lunula was one of good grooming and sophistication.”
And while the supernal design reigned supreme until the late ’30s, the moon manicure waned in popularity and was pretty much gone by 1942. Every now and then, the design resurfaces as a throwback gag, “as some kind of editorial style, just to be distinctive,” Ms. Shapiro said. Today the manicure re-emerges when there is an on-the-nose homage to the golden age of Hollywood. The burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese has worn the style, and the moon manicure appears in David Lynch’s neo-noir film “Mulholland Drive.”
Creating a moon manicure as pristine as the one in the ’30s would have taken a painstaking amount of time, so the “Marty Supreme” team opted for press-ons. They hired Pattie Yankee, a nail artist who has been affixing those sticky things to clients, like Priyanka Chopra and Julianne Moore, for more than 20 years.
To perfect the moon manicure with a press-on, Ms. Panchenko measured Ms. Paltrow’s nail beds to fit her design, and then Ms. Yankee painted each moon freehand on the press-on. She made seven press-on sets, including extras (around 80 total), for Ms. Paltrow, who had numerous nail changes.
“You can pull them off and just go to the next color within five minutes,” Ms. Panchenko said, adding: “Gwyneth is a speed queen. She just likes to get ‘done’ really fast.”
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