Elyria is Your Source for Exotic Fake Nails
BY NINA LALLI

Planning on attending a prom soon? Turning tricks in downtown Oberlin? Doing an impression of SWV? You are in luck. Not far from here, just outside the wonderful shopping microcosm of Elyria’s Midway Mall is a little place called Exotic Nails. 
This is your chance to have thick, sturdy, lengthy talons affixed to your hands for a whopping $30, and airbrushed (totally necessary) for an additional $10 or so, depending on the design you chose. The selection is decent, featuring your average array of palm trees, hearts, stars and various patterned designs. It holds nothing to the places in Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall, which offer Playboy bunnies, dollar signs or “I love Jesus” in script. Exotic Nails also offers the controversial Wahoo logo for airbrushing.
The experience is not for the weak, the timid, the cute. This is a serious and bizarre beauty ritual. If you have ever gotten a regular manicure, you know that there is a lot of soaking and massaging involved, then the painting. It’s all about being pampered, relaxing, being beautified by a professional. A total luxury. Getting acrylic tips has nothing to do with any aspect of that experience; so forget it.
You walk in and put your name on a waiting list. Then observe the millions of nails on display, some on the wall, others attached to long skewers and exhibited like flowers in vases for some reason. It is indeterminate whether this is a conscious attempt to scare customers or some back-scratching invention.
When your name is called, you will be seated and your nail polish (if you are wearing any) will be removed hastily. Then an electric nail file will be applied to your nails -- not the edges but the entire surface of them as well as your cuticles, which will sting and burn for the rest of the day.
Finally the manicurist will glue fake nails to the edges of your own pathetically stumpy, manly nails, creating long curved claws which make you laugh and extend about four inches outward. If you are Barbara Streisand or any VH1 diva, you may leave them at this length, but chances are you will decide where they should be cut to suit your personality and lifestyle. 
There are a lot of chemicals involved, all of which sting and burn and make your eyes water when applied to your chafed fingers. The most off-putting and simultaneously intriguing has to be the powder, which turns into “nail substance“ when it comes into contact, on a paint brush, with another unknown chemical, this one in liquid form. 
This is painted onto your nails in smooth strokes of the brush, creating an incredibly thick, rounded effect resembling nothing remotely natural. It will be smoothed with that infamous electric file you thought was gone for good when it was last removed from your vision.
Your manicurist has no pity for you, and beyond the initial excitement, no interest in your fascination with the procedure. Taking photographs of every step is not encouraged or seen as cute in any way. Note that these people spend the entire day in a room filled with fumes so intense they have surgical masks covering their mouths. By the time I left Exotic Nails I was incredibly light-headed from the fumes, could barely zip my own fly, definitely not tie my shoe-laces, felt like a small invisible alien was pulling on my fingernails, and had been treated with open hostility by my nail guy. 
When I requested a pink base coat with gold airbrushing, he was not pleased and told me they had no gold airbrush paint, which broke my heart. 
Then he abandoned me at the airbrushing table with no airbrusher, which made me very upset. In the end, it was fine: my nails look heinous, but I am revelling in the heinousness. 
When you have had enough of the tips, hope you have cable because you have to soak them in a tub of acetone, concetrated nail polish remover you can buy at hardware stores. I like to buy my beauty products at the hardware store, generally. 
Junior Emma Straub (a newcomer to the world of acrylic nails) exclaimed, “My thumb is glued to my new nail!” and began biting said glue off her finger and spitting it on the floor, “my teeth are the only weapon I have left,” she lamented. 
But it was worth it. Straub is ready for an Oberlin weekend now that she needs assistance applying lip gloss, lighting cigarettes, dialing telephone numbers, not to mention typing, styling hair and playing the piano. Bring it on.