Discover The Bold Beauty Of Toenail Art With This Extravagant Photo Series

There is a sizeable community on the internet expressing a great love for nail art. From elegance to imagination, the hobby celebrates creativity and everything on the artistic spectrum fulfilling every daily need.

Certainly an intricate art form, Instagram accounts show off every detail at the tip of creators' fingertips. But the lesser-shown set? Dig a bit deeper, go a bit lower and you'll find it: toenail art.

Artist and photographer Amy Lombard creates a new photo series, NAILS PT. 2, after an inital collaboration focusing on nail art in 2015. Working with nail artist Natalie Pavloski back then and Sonya Meesh now, Lombard fuses photography and nail art to create a staggering series, with foot modelling by Amanda Lanzone.

On her first series, Lombard explains the importance of creating a juxtaposition that is glorious and disgusting simultaneously, in combining extravagant nails and grotesque fast food. A polarizing stylistic touch also seeps into NAILS PT. 2.

The motivation for this new project comes from a desire to explore an equally growing community:

"The work was particularly inspired by women who favor long, acrylic sets on their toenails.

Like any community, they have their own corner of the internet where they come together and if you look hard enough you'll find amateur photographs of their long extravagant toenails in scenarios ranging from (what I now know is) the go-to pose of bare feet on gas and break pedal, feet covered in food, to photos of more stylized photos in front of silky backdrops."

Throughout Lombard's work, an infatuation with strong contrasts, both in photographic methods and in subject matters, is key. In NAILS PT.2 this translates in the range of concepts and contexts showing off the toenail art.

Flirting with food and kneading the rubble, the series shines a light on the highs and lows of a bold, bright and brilliant art form. You can discover more of Amy's work on her website, and the full series below.

Lana Del Rey's New Way of Seeing

Lana Del Rey always makes me think about John Berger, the writer and critic who died this past January, at the age of ninety. In "Ways of Seeing," Berger wrote that a woman is "almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself." Since she entered the pop ecosystem, in 2011, Del Rey's career has been defined by extravagant self-consciousness, rendered through a narrow set of intertwined cultural tropes. In "Blue Jeans" and "Video Games," the D.I.Y. music videos that made her famous, Del Rey intercut Webcam clips of herself with archival footage of American iconography: palm trees, Vegas neon, roses blooming, police, paparazzi, the Stars and Stripes. (These days, on Instagram, she often murmurs her music into the front-facing camera of her phone.) She pouted as she sang, wearing lace and gold and crosses, looking like a self-composed collage. She was a moll, a starlet, a Stepford wife—a "gangster Nancy Sinatra," as she herself put it. She seemed so aware of the image she was creating that, to many, she inevitably seemed fake.

But artifice is not the same thing as dishonesty. Forty years before social media would lend a new dimension to his thesis, Berger wrote that a woman's "own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another"—namely, by a male viewer. Women, Berger argued, live in a state of self-consciousness that is at once artificial and authentic to the world we live in. He offers two images for comparison: the 1814 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting "La Grande Odalisque" and a photo from a nineteen-sixties girlie magazine. "Is not the expression remarkably similar in each case?" he asks. "It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her—although she doesn't know him." It is an expression that Del Rey wears as she stares at the camera in those early videos. She controlled the process, unlike the women in those images; but, like them, she was "offering up her femininity as the surveyed," as Berger put it. As tends to happen, she was both rewarded and punished for doing so.

My favorite Del Rey song is the demo version of "National Anthem," a song that appeared on her début album, "Born to Die," from 2012. The album cut is a sweeping, kitschy, string-section fantasia; its opening sounds like the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony." The demo is rougher, with a crunchy, grinding beat and a Joan Jett bass line. In the D.I.Y. video that accompanies it, Del Rey dances in a dress that looks like a cupcake, singing for the camera between clips of Elvis, fireworks, and Air Force One. She's isolated—she has the look of someone who's locked herself in a hotel room—and she wears that expression again, luxuriating in the pleasure of her own image as viewed by an as-yet-imaginary audience. "He will do very well / I can tell, I can tell / Keep me safe, in his bell tower, hotel," she sings. She has fully allied her performance with the idea that, as Berger wrote, women are "born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men."

That video was leaked in June, 2012, shortly before the release of the official video—a seven-minute production in which Del Rey plays both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy to A$AP Rocky's J.F.K. It is a hyper-specific distillation of American romance: golden late afternoon on Chappaquiddick; champagne and diamonds; blue hydrangeas, red dresses, endless green lawns. Visually and lyrically, the imagery is simple: rich men and beautiful women; freedom through submission—"wind in my hair / hand on the back of my neck." Del Rey's two governing aesthetics, love and country, collapse into each other completely. "Tell me I'm your national anthem," she pleads on the chorus, repeating the line as the chords shift to sudden, unnerving euphoria. If Del Rey's entire project is an experiment in all-encompassing narrative obedience, this song is proof of concept to me. The national anthem is as good a metaphor as any for the blind, binding pledges of romantic love.

What Can Luxury Learn from Beauty Influencers

Each May, the world's leading luxury fashion houses present their cruise shows with elaborate marketing spectacles often staged in far-flung locations and attended by a travelling herd of industry insiders, celebrities and, for the past decade or so, a flock of digital influencers and bloggers. Budgets range anywhere from $2 million to over $10 million.

Is it worth the investment? The short answer is maybe. Success can be measured in earned media value: what it would otherwise cost to buy the impressions driven by these events and their PR, influencer and social media amplification strategies.

In May 2017, when Chanel, Dior, Gucci and Louis Vuitton held cruise shows in Paris, Los Angeles, Florence and Kyoto respectively, Gucci's presentation outpaced competitors — even Chanel, which has a larger social media following — clocking over $63 million in earned media value, up 170 percent year-over-year for the month, according to marketing firm Tribe Dynamics. Of the four, Louis Vuitton came in last place, generating $25 million in earned media value, a 31 percent decrease year-over-year for the month.

But even Gucci pales in comparison to Anastasia Beverly Hills, one of the hottest beauty brands on the internet, which generated $90 million in earned media value in the same month — and that without spending untold millions on a splashy cruise event.

It's not an apples-to-apples correlation, of course. Beauty drives digital conversion more naturally than luxury ready-to-wear or accessories because it is accessible to a far wider audience. Beauty products lend themselves more readily to conversations about which products to use and how to apply them. (Consider the popularity of YouTube makeup tutorials, which can garner millions of views and thousands of comments.) They're also relatively more affordable, which means it's easier to convert engagement to an actual purchase. In the first six months of 2017, the world's top five beauty brands generated a total of $1.9 billion in earned media value, $688 million more than the top five luxury fashion brands.

The gap between the earned media impact of beauty and luxury fashion brands should be no surprise to anyone following the rise of independent beauty brands like the aforementioned Anastasia Beverly Hills and Colourpop, which have disrupted incumbents, in part, by dominating the digital conversation. They nurture relationships with thousands of micro-influential consumers by sending them products, inviting them to events, introducing them to executives and celebrating their personal and professional accomplishments.

By contrast, luxury fashion brands have been slow to use the same approach because they have rich histories with which to contend, something many of these newer, more successful beauty lines don't need to worry about protecting. Therefore, luxury brands are less willing to trust outsiders to play a significant role in their marketing efforts. And when they do, they focus on a select group of established macro-influencers, such as Chiara Ferragni, Aimee Song and Bryan Grey Yambao, also known as BryanBoy — each with well over 100,000 followers on Instagram and documented histories of staying on message.

Luxury brands are historically much less willing to cultivate relationships with unproven, smaller-scale personalities who often have more impact on their followers than macro-influencers: according to influencer tracking company Markerly, engagement decreases as audience size increases, and users with 10,000 to 100,000 followers offer the best combination of engagement and reach.

"With luxury, there is hesitation to get into a media format that you don't have a lot of control over…to embrace this community of people that are creating content, that really are the new publishers and editors and bring them into the fold," says Conor Begley, co-founder and president of Tribe Dynamics. "But the frank reality is that you don't have a choice anymore."

By largely failing to engage and steer the digital conversation at scale, luxury fashion brands have, in fact, relinquished control. "The audience is just talking about the brand in the way they see fit," explains Thomas Rankin, co-founder of visual marketing intelligence platform Dash Hudson. "And now certain luxury brands are almost embarrassed by the conversation that has happened from the audience."

The growing volume of social media activity is increasingly drowning out official brand communications, making it harder and harder for marketers without strong influencer strategies to get their message across. "Every year you see 50 percent more photos being shared and you're seeing engagement drop 10 percent year-over-year," says Rankin. "If you don't have an audience that has deep connections with other people, you can't compete, even if you continue to increase the amount you put out in the ecosystem. You essentially start to disappear unless you dump billions of dollars into advertising."

According to Tribe Dynamics, the top influencer driving the conversation on luxury products is the popular — and controversial — singer-songwriter, model and make-up artist Jeffree Star, who has over 500 million views on YouTube and almost five million followers on Instagram. "[Star] is talking not just about the beauty brands, but also the fashion apparel and accessories products," says Begley, recalling a meeting in which representatives from one luxury house told him they didn't want to be associated with Star, although he was already driving more conversation about the brand than anyone else.

Beauty and the Bestiality

The half-buried truth about Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" is that, in the end, the prince is a letdown. At the end of the 1991 cartoon, when the enchantment is lifted, he looks incomplete, vaguely embryonic—a smooth-skinned creature with maidenly bedhead and a tentative smile. Even for a viewer too young, as I was, to grasp the psychosexual undertones of a tale as old as this one, the Beast's physicality—the big buffalo head, the wolf's tail, all pathos and silly roughness—seemed less like an obstacle in the love story than its central object.

The same is true in the live-action remake, which stars Emma Watson as Belle, and Dan Stevens, for most of the movie, as the disturbingly tender human eyes that blink from the face of the C.G.I.-swaddled Beast. Without the layer of abstraction provided by Disney's cartoonists, it's harder to ignore the uneasiness of this particular romantic adventure. During the duet "Something There," Watson sings, about the Beast's suddenly apparent sweetness, "I wonder why I didn't see it there before." (I wanted to yell, as if to a girlfriend across a bar table, that the delay might have been because her man was a bison.) As the song continued, the Beast sang, full of pathetic wonder, "When we touched, she didn't shudder at my paw," and the woman sitting alone one seat away from me, who had treated herself to two wines during our Alamo Drafthouse matinée, started to giggle. When Belle and the Beast met at the top of the grand staircase, and "Tale As Old As Time" started swelling, the woman—a stranger, and a perfect one—leaned over to me. "What's his dick like?" she whispered.

In Anthony Lane's review of "Beauty and the Beast" for the magazine, he noted the glint and tug of sex in Jean Cocteau's 1946 "La Belle et la Bête," in which the Beast, after becoming a man again, says to Belle, "It's as though you missed my ugliness." Lane writes, "The lady preferred the animal. Such thoughts are out of bounds, needless to say, in the Disney garden." And still, at the end of the remake, as Belle is dancing with her prince, who wears powder-blue pants and a hair ribbon, she asks him, flirtatiously, if he'd consider growing a beard. He looks back at her knowingly, and gives a short, beastly roar.

A new book from Penguin, edited by Maria Tatar, titled "Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World," provides some historical context. Belle's story, Tatar writes in the introduction, is a "mere nostalgic remnant of a vast repertoire of stories" about similar pairings—fairy tales and folktales that turn "antagonists into allies," allowing us to pursue an "understanding of what we share with beasts even as we try to discover what makes us human."

Both of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" movies are essentially faithful to the durable, child-friendly version written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont for her Magasin des Enfants, in 1756. That was a morality tale in which Beauty deserves her happy ending—the prince, his riches—because of her modest decency, which just so happens to coexist with her superior intelligence and undeniable good looks. (In the 2017 remake, Watson's Belle is refigured as an inventor working to increase literacy among young village girls.)

The "Beauty and the Beast" story may originally have held appeal because of its relatability. "Many an arranged marriage must have felt like being tethered to a monster," Tatar writes. The many stories featuring a young woman turned over to a beast for the financial or social benefit of her family "may have furnished women with a socially acceptable channel for providing advice, comfort, and the consolations of imagination," preparing them "for an alliance that required effacing their own desires."

The animating question behind these tales of beastly alliances, however, remains: Which desires are quashed, and which are awakened? What is the heroine robbed of, and what is she given—both in the manner in which her story is told and within the story itself? The best-known antecedent to "Beauty and the Beast" is the ancient Greek myth of Zeus and Europa, in which the unfaithful deity transforms into a bull and kidnaps a pretty virgin. It's a story of rape and abduction that's generally framed as a story of rapture, with many a painter depicting Europa in "erotic abandonment and oceanic ecstasy," Tatar writes. In Edith Hamilton's version of the myth, which is reprinted in the Penguin book, Europa is attracted to the bull. "She cried to the others to come with her and mount him. . . . He is so mild and dear and gentle to behold. He is not like a bull, but like a good, true man." The bull leaps into the air and, when Europa becomes afraid, he tells her "she had no cause to fear. . . . He was Zeus, greatest of gods, and all he was doing was from love for her."

Another story, an Italian folktale called "King Pig," is a bit more explicit. A young man is cursed by three fairies, doomed to exist in the form of a pig until he has "taken a woman to wife three times." The pig kills his first two wives, who dislike his "foul and dirty" body. His third wife, however, treats him sweetly. When the pig kisses her, "she was not at all backward in returning his caresses." In the morning, the pig's mother sees the young bride "lying in the bed, muddy as it was, looking entirely pleased and contented." The heroines aren't always reluctant. In a Greek folktale called "The Golden Crab," the beautiful princess announces, "I am married to a crab, and I want no one else."

Even when the heroines begin by resisting, as Belle does, they usually give in to their animal husbands in uneven, complicated ways. In "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," a Norwegian story, a father signs his daughter over to a large white bear in exchange for a promise of riches. The daughter resists and resists, and then, finally, she fixes her hair and puts on a nice dress, and rides away on bearback. In an English folktale called "The Small-Tooth Dog," another father consigns his daughter to the ugly titular canine. When she cries and begs to be taken home, the dog asks her, "What do you call me?" She answers honestly, and he's furious. He asks her again, and she says, "Your name is Sweet-as-a-honeycomb."

Most of the stories about young women and animal grooms follow a predictable pattern. The human brides don't have much choice in the matter. They leave home; they submit to an animal; they often suffer; occasionally they experience flickers of deep attraction and love. In the end, they're often rewarded by riches, and the animal is replaced by a man. But the Penguin book also includes plenty of stories in which the genders are flipped, pairing young men with animal brides. In these tales, the animal women are generally phenomenal domestics, and the plot usually goes one of two ways. Either the spell is broken after the animal proves her worth in the home, and she turns back into a maiden—or the animal is forced to become human at the beginning of the story, when the man steals her feathers or breaks her shell. In this type of story, the woman escapes, turning back into an animal, in the end.

The best-known animal-bride story is, perhaps, the Japanese folktale "The Crane Wife," which is surpassingly beautiful: a tale of mutual sacrifice and betrayal, with a pivotal scene of a young man peeking into a room to see his wife as a crane, weaving a lustrous fabric out of her own feathers and blood. In this story, the crane wife offers herself freely and leaves at will—a fairy-tale outcome if I've ever heard one.