Tuesday, December 23, 2003
The version is for the woman who is unafraid to wield her femininity.
By LYDIA MARTIN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
There's a startling little style rumor being bandied about town that the Cuban manicure is coming back in vogue. Louder than salsa radio remotes from the Gus Machado Ford dealership and more dramatic than Olga Guillot singing a bolero, the Cuban manicure puts the feeble French version to shame in the flash department.
Never mind what it does to the American manicure.
Let's just say the Cuban manicure is for the woman who is unafraid to wield her femininity. It's about sky-high stilettos, not sensible pumps.
And it never really went out of fashion -- it just holed up in Hialeah, Fla. It also lives any place, within Hialeah city limits or not, referred to as "la peluqueria," the beauty shop where the mature woman ventures on Saturday mornings for a weekly refreshing of her Cuban Lady Bouffant. God forbid she leave that "peluqueria" without also getting the proper nail job.
We're talking Screaming Red middles, with pearly white tips and moons. Sure, you can still call it a Cuban if you use a more sedate color, say something in the pink or peach or tan department -- but that's like calling a song by Pat Boone (even if he's sporting leather while he's singing it) rock 'n' roll.
There's one simple rule: The redder, the Cuban-er.
"And you have to cut the cuticles way back," says Mercy Espalter, a manicurist at Some Like it Hot, the trendy salon at Brownes & amp; Co. Apothecary in Miami Beach, Fla. "A person who asks for a Cuban manicure doesn't want to see any extra skin. With the American and the French, you just push back the cuticles."
She happens to be an old hand at the Cuban manicure.
"I used to give everybody in my family Cuban manicures when I lived in Cuba," said Espalter, who moved to the states eight years ago and hasn't had much occasion to practice the style on South Beach.
She also happens to be a woman who's got grit.
"That's the manicure of the old Cuban ladies," Espalter says flat out.
But don't be so sure. There have been initial reports of the Cuban making a comeback among the hipper whippersnappers.
"Yes, for years now it has been the older women who ask for the Cuban manicure," says Susana Cohen, a receptionist at Samy's, the hair salon at the Radisson Mart that might be called Gold Card Cuban Central. "But lately, we get some young girls asking for it, too."
Cohen happens to be celebrity stylist Samy's aunt, and a woman of a certain age who would never leave home without her white-tipped red nails. "I love it. It wouldn't be me without my Cuban manicure. I've been getting them since I was probably 15 and in Cuba. I came here in 1962 and I've always gotten it here, too. People notice a Cuban manicure. I have been on planes, I have been in Las Vegas, and American women have come up to me asking where I got my manicure."
Techniques
There are two ways to do the Cuban.
"You can start by painting the whole nail white, then you carefully paint over the middle part in red," says Norma de la Cruz, a manicurist at Samy's. "Or you paint the whole nail red, then you remove the red from the tips and the moons and you paint them white. I have done it both ways."
A French manicure calls for a pale pink middle with white, but not pearly, tips and an American is about the natural look, which means a whisper of pink and clear.
Maritza Roque, a bookkeeper for a construction company in South Dade, Fla., says she only recently got her first Cuban.
"I always saw my mom and my grandmother get them, but I was never into it. I mean, I didn't get any manicures at all. But my husband seems to like it," said Roque, 27, who got married a year ago. "My mother took me to a salon before the wedding and I got this manicure, which seemed liked a bad idea at the time. But I decided I liked it. It's fun and red."
Out of practice
Maribel Moya, a manicurist at a salon in the Eden Roc hotel, says she used to do the Cuban all day long when she worked in a Hialeah salon. But she has been on the Beach for years now, which means she's out of practice.
"Sometimes we have conventions here of Cuban doctors. Whenever they're here, I know I'll get a lot of wives asking for the Cuban manicure. But the tourists usually ask for the French."