IYI, Tony Poe is famous for tossin’ severed heads onto enemy locations and, on one occasion, when his superiors questioned his body counts (this was during the Vietnam War, which makes me figure he must have been paid on a per-kill, piecework basis because this is possibly the only time in that entire conflict where someone on the American side said ‘There’s no way you killed that many of the enemy’) he calmly provided hard evidence to verify his claims.
… By which I mean, of course, he mailed a bag of fuckin’ ears to the US Embassy in Vientiane. Possibly more than once. His personnel file must look like Ed Gein’s Rolodex.
This isn’t that grisly, of course, but – okay, fine, it’s a charm bracelet where the charms are human toenails. There’s some context for this, of course, but if you’re somehow the type who found this, read with bland, placid face about Tony Poe, Ed Gein joke, got to the toenails, and then decided that nope, no context makes that palatable, well… Probably don’t want to make the jump.
Context? I run long distances, usually on trails, for the most part. My toenails (yeah, yeah, TMI, but this is a post about turning shed toenails into jewelry, so… it’s one of the milder side effects of ultrarunning, let’s just say…) are stubby to begin with, and I run in VFFs, so the usual cause of dropped nails – slamming into the front of a too-loose toebox – isn’t much of an issue for me. Slamming the tops of my toes into rocks or exposed roots, directly on the nail and raising a walloping blister underneath it, on the other hand…
So yeah, like a lot of long-distance runners, I’ve lost a number of toenails. Some, yeah, more than once.
Getting bored with just tagging and bagging them, I started to think of what I could actually use them for. (Note: I was completely unaware of this until my brother forwarded me the link. Once I saw it, I was… not a huge fan of it, personally. I mean, for one thing he’s using other people’s toenails, which strikes me as disgusting and/or cheating, and for another it looks like a pain to add more toenails. So I’m happy with my charm bracelet.)
Individual toenails to add on as I lose ’em… something where they’re being used as things rather than, like, raw materials… only mildly ‘artistic’ instead of, like, I dunno, using them to make a macaroni-style collage, or something?
Charm bracelet it is!
Now, ‘fresh’ or ‘raw’ toenails are indeed rather grody. Even after the ‘drying-out’ period (nails are 7-12% water; thanks, Wikipedia!) and resting, they’re still kinda… gnarly. (And my toenails are gnarlier than most, and while I agree it’s a bit odd to be talkin’ about my toenails like this, given that a charm bracelet’s bein’ made outta them, I think we’re well past that point.)
First thing to do’s clean up the toenail.
After trimming it down to the raw nail, removing as much surface gunk as possible without losing the essential character of my very own cast-off flesh (technically an unguis), I’m left with the ‘dressed’ nail:
Now, though, I gotta get that sucker onto a charm. Drilling a hole’s tricky, but necessary, ’cause a wire cage is… not what I decided to do. At least on my nails, the end portion is thicker, but attaching the clip and tag there would reverse the normal orientation of the nail and look out of order.
Fortunately, thanks to my (formerly, ha!) ingrown toenails (yes, yes, TMI, but fer crissakes remember what you’re reading) the edges are curled over and thicker.
But, even though I don’t (I should say ‘of course‘, but I realize that this whole project may sort of lead one to beg that particular question) plan on wearing this beyond novelty occasions, it’s still porous protein and ought to be protected.
Riffing on the caption above, I have purchased the following nail-care products without ever once having them touch my actual nails:
- Emory boards and files: Cleaning flashing off of cast model parts.
- Nail polish: Colorfilling Glock magazines.
- Nail polish remover: Cleaning my typewriters.
- And now this. Not just topcoat, but also nail-hardener.
Next up comes the topcoat, but that’s boring and looks basically the same as the above, and there’s also repeating the above for the rest of the suitable nails, but id., so on to the tiny little metal tags! Those’re what’ll make this a charm bracelet and not just, like, some dude with a bunch of toenails tied to his wrist. That would be weird and icky. But for those I’m still waiting on my alphanumeric punches from China (last located in Shenzhen) so –
Don Norum 