Teddy Swims and the Electric Blue Manicure
The soul singer with the record-shattering voice has a gel mani story that's about way more than polish.
Hello, Gorgeous!
When I met with Teddy Swims via Zoom a few weeks ago, I noticed his electric blue manicure — and it filled me with absolute joy. I kept sneaking peeks from his extremely expressive, extremely tattooed hands (including his tattooed palms!) to his gorgeous mani and back again. So with about sixty seconds left in our interview, I had to ask about his nails.
We’d just spent fifteen minutes covering the sacred — his Pentecostal minister grandfather, faith, fatherhood, his new tour (you can read that whole conversation in my Yahoo piece), and his fun partnership with White Claw, which included a teddy floatie. So I felt it only fair to warn him I was about to pivot from the absolutely beautiful to the completely surface: I love the color of his blue shiny nails. I asked him if it was something he did just for himself, or if it was part of his beauty routine…or rather his ugly routine (His arena tour is called The Ugly. He liked that one.)
Here’s what I didn’t expect: the manicure isn’t really about the color at all.
“I had them actually done with some gels on them a couple days ago,” Swims told me, “but I broke a couple, and then I just pulled them all off, because I just got too rough. But I try to keep them painted until I get them done again, because I’m so bad about it. I’ll bite around the cuticles.”
And then he got honest in the way that, I’ve learned during our brief hangout, Teddy Swims is. “It’s been helping me a lot with that awful habit I have of just destroying them. If I don’t keep them painted, my cuticles, my fingers will be bitten down to the knuckle. So I gotta be good.”
Swims said his mother tried the classic fix when he was younger — that bitter no-bite polish so many of us remember. “I remember my mom used to always put that, like, nasty stuff on them, and I just bit right through it anyway. It didn’t stop me.”
The gel manicure did.
“It’s that, or bite the inside of my cheeks,” Swims said. “I got these little nervous habits that I’m trying to do whatever it takes to get past.”
And there it is. The man who headlines arenas with UGLY on his posters, who sings like his heart is permanently hanging in full view outside his body, keeps his nails painted electric blue not for the aesthetic (though the aesthetic is spectacular) but as an act of self-care. The polish is doing the job his mom’s bitter stuff never could, because this time he chose it.
I told him the image of him with a gel manicure would stay with me forever. Weeks later, it still has. Worth noting: I made Swims blush at one point — nothing untoward, I promise. It was the deeply spiritual stuff that got to him in a big way.
Inspired by Teddy Swims’ mani: have you ever used a beauty ritual to break a habit or soothe a nervous one? A manicure to stop the biting, a lip balm to stop the picking? Let’s meet in the comments to discuss!
Rachel, your beauty concierge 💋