Manicures are not for the faint of heart.

I got one this past Friday, and I had to sit facing Arnold Schwarzenegger the whole time.

Okay, okay, so he wasn’t “the” Arnold Schwarzenegger. But he was a super buff dude who did nails and hair, he said, for the small price of $75.

I happened to have $75 on hand, and I had promised my mother that I’d get myself a manicure for her birthday.

You would think my mother would prefer that she get a manicure for her birthday, but then you don’t know my mother.

So I ended up sitting with my fingers splayed while Mr. Schwarzenegger (I suppose I should call him that) wrapped a blisteringly hot towel around my hands.

I barely had time to react. I gritted my teeth and faced the onslaught like a true champion.

After the hot towel came the moisturizer. Mr. Schwarzenegger practically pulverized my hands to get it fully absorbed.

He shaped my nails with a nail file, but he might as well have used a hammer and chisel. I watched my fingernails slowly become rounded at the tips.

I thought I was finished when he finally applied not one, but two coats of color to my nails. But he just kept going. My nails had so many coats, they could have thrown a Christmas party.

At last I was instructed to hold my hands under a fan to let the paint dry. In the meantime, Mr. Schwarzenegger attacked my head.

He leaned me back in my chair until my hair went into a tub of water that was as cold as… as something really cold.

You try thinking of similes when you’re getting your hair done.

Mr. Schwarzenegger pulled my hair back so tightly I couldn’t wiggle my eyebrows. But that was just the start.

In and out went the curling irons, the hair dryer, the brushes and combs. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Either way, my head ended up feeling all tingly. Or maybe that was just me realizing how much hair he had ripped out.

But I looked in the mirror and saw a new face. A beautiful face, you might say. Or, you know, not.

“I have made a duchess out of a flower girl,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, and it was really a pity that he didn’t have an Austrian accent.

After all his work, the girl looking back was unrecognizable.

I saw the face of one who had done battle with the salon, and the salon won.

Later that night, with my hair looser and my eyebrows once more wiggly, I had time to reflect on that old adage: “Makeup will not make an ugly woman pretty, but it can make a pretty woman beautiful.”

Makeup made me tired. I wonder what the experts have to say about that.

But it was an illuminating experience, getting a manicure. I realized I didn’t have to look drab and rundown all the time.

I could be drab and rundown and happy, gosh darn it, and that’s how I’ll stay.

No more makeovers for me. And definitely none from Mr. Schwarzenegger.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.