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Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane friend’s advice, had my real fingernails drilled down to nothing for the sake of having longer, obviously artificial nails installed The effect was simultaneously intoxicating, and impractical I re-learned how to type; relied, reluctantly, on male help in the workplace and at home to perform mundane tasks like opening cans and buttoning blouses I did not remember ever thinking that my hands had looked more beautiful, less like my hands They were like a celebrity’s; an artwork After two months, unable to afford maintenance, I had the nails removed Cut necessarily down to the quick, my fingernails now made my fingers look like toes, artless and blunt I could no longer regard my hands and think, as one is meant to after leaving an appointment at a salon, that I did not fully recognise them There was no distance, no transformation   Nail salons and hairdressers specialise in modifying the literally live-dead parts of human bodies; those that grow after we die, but do not bleed if cut More often than not, the live-dead parts being modified belong to women, who are not unused to being seen as an admixture of desirable-or-undesirable bodily fragments, rather than as whole This is especially true for famous women, whose live and live-dead parts are familiar enough to us, after such long exposure, to behave like semaphore; to signify a thing beside themselves In a promotional release for Live Dead World, a new show by the artist Gabriele Beveridge, an image appeared on Seventeen Gallery’s website Folded over on each other, pages from women’s high-fashion magazines – fluid and smooth, held in place by two or three rubber bands – made an abstract, feminine composite out of girl-eyes, girl-lips, and faded, indistinct girl-faces There, located front and centre, was Britney Spears’s mouth, a logo as distinctive as a Coca Cola bottle It is peculiar, and a little eerie, that although it’s possible I may not recognise my own mouth in a