Well-kept nails have been explained for years as vanity, or as a trifle people throw money at. The psychologist Ana Galán, a specialist in trauma and emotional regulation, turns the question round: not what a manicure says about a person, but what it gives them.

Her first condition is that a single meaning does not exist. "Consistently cared-for nails can mean many different things depending on the personality. For some it is simply aesthetics or hygiene, for others a way of expressing their own identity." So the same habit in two women is not measuring the same thing - which is precisely the opposite of what every psychological analysis headlined "what your nails say about you" claims.

The mechanism that does work

What Galán points to as real is the effect of the ritual itself. "Repeatable and pleasant rituals create a sense of pause, order and wellbeing that can momentarily reduce stress." The key word is momentarily - she is not claiming a manicure solves anything, but that it creates a break.

The second part is more concrete still. "Time devoted exclusively to yourself encourages switching off from everyday worries and can strengthen the sense that a person deserves to look after themselves." That is not about nails. It is about half an hour in which nobody asks anything of you and the phone is not in your hand - a thing that has become harder to arrange these days than the procedure itself.

There is another side worth mentioning without dramatising it: the same ritual can grow into a burden. When the state of your nails becomes a condition for leaving the house, the pause has turned into one more checklist. The difference is not visible from the outside - it shows in what happens when there is no time to go.

So it is not about the nails. It is about whether half an hour exists that is only yours and that you owe nobody an explanation for. If those thirty minutes only appear when there is a justification in the shape of an appointment, that says more than any colour.