Never Cleaning Up

Glitter nail polish is “fun, feminine and manages to capture a generous amount of attention” according to the blogger alexandra. ¹ She argues that glitter polishes and other “lovely feminine nail art” designs “attract only positive attention towards the hands and enhance their beauty.” On a beauty site, hirra notes that glitter eye makeup extends women’s “femininity” and makes women more “attractive for others.” ² alexandra and hirra associate glitter with femininity and the ways women are directed to function as visual objects and make themselves more appealing to other people. Their identification of glitter as an amplification of femininity is related to visual culture researchers John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin’s assertion that gleams and glitter “extend the self beyond bodily limits.” ³ These comments about glitter also evoke Teresa de Lauretis’s examination of the ways gender is produced through social technologies and Jack Brat-ich’s classification of Internet technologies and settings as “extensions” of bodily digits, people, and ideas. ⁴ Glitter functions as a technology because it produces women and femininity; emphasizes women’s visual features by illuminating them; and is rendered from small fragments of plastic, metal, and other materials that reflect light. ⁵