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The Problematic Politics of Halal Nail Polish: or how pseudoscience services magical thinking.
First, let me present my credentials, since we live in such an identity politics/ fake news blitzed world. Who am I to talk about ‘Halal Nail Polish’ with any semblance of credibility?
For starters, it’s nail polish and I’m a girl. A woman, really, since I started out a girl and then graduated to woman, a state that’s more of a fend-for-yourself-beyond-the-Wall-with-the-White-Walkers kind of emancipation these days.
I’ve also, staying within the same paradigm, been Muslim, born and raised, and eventually apostatized, only to experience my emancipation similarly cloaked as tribal rejection.
So on the issue of Halal Nail Polish, I am the outsider with the inside edge times 2. I’m also kind of sciency, having completed a medical degree and been in practice for 20 years in the United States.
But that didn’t stop this from happening: when I challenged the concept of ‘air and moisture getting to nails’ as being healthy, given that the nail polish is being touted as permeable to water and air, and therefore automagically ‘healthier’ for nails, the interaction would end with my being called an ‘idiot and a ridiculous moron’.
Never mind my points about nails being dead keratin with no ability to interact meaningfully with air or water: might as well advertise wooden tables as being ‘able to breathe and be healthier’. But what do I know?
As so happens with many such Facebook encounters, I used the time to do some quick research of my own. I honestly wanted to know what the science was. And how it was being extrapolated into the realm of the halal. Or as I tweeted:
how was pseudoscience being placed in the service of magical thinking?
And so I googled “breathable nail polish”, “water permeable nail polish”, “evidence behind*”, etc. And I would be bombarded by hundreds of blogs and websites, mostly of the make-up marketing/ fashion magazine kind, but then also of the halal make-up blog kind, and by more serious-minded Islamic blogs asking and answering the all-important question of the Ummah: is halal nail polish really halal? These were some big questions being asked here, and I waded right in.
I found out there are ‘lifestyle reasons’ why a woman might be embarrassed to wear nail polish, “some find it embarrassing to do so because it could signal they are menstruating” since they were only allowed to wear nail polish when unable to pray, and therefore not required to do the wudu, the ritual ablution with water.
Apparently muslim sisters don’t go through the ravaging salt-cravings that usually give me away.
There was no hard science to be found about this ‘air and moisture permeable’ nail polish. The top hits when you google “breathable nail polish” are the manufacturers and sellers of such brands as Kester Black, an Australian company, which demonstrates on its infographic heavy website in a very simplistic, ‘girly-science friendly’-font and style, that O2 permeates the layer, and this is called ‘breathability’, and water fills the interstices of ball bearings, and this is called ‘water permeability’. What this has to do with the price of tea is never revealed in its entirety. I’m just supposed to assume that these states are more ‘desirable’ when it came to nail health.
The most aggressive halal-friendly marketer, Orly, in conjunction with Muslim Girl, touts this as nail polish ‘for muslim women’, declaring it solves a problem that I believe was invented just for muslim women too: “Prior to the creation of porous nail polish, devout Muslim women and men were not allowed to wear nail polish because it interferes with wudu or ablution — the Islamic procedure of washing parts of the body before prayer.
“If something is blocking [your nails], that is not acceptable,” says Habib Ghanim, director of ISWA Halal Certification Department and president of USA Halal Chamber of Commerce. “When wudu is performed, water has to touch every part of your body. If you have nail polish on that is non-porous, that is not considered halal.”
I only hope Orly sent Mr Ghanim’s wives enough free samples to keep them fashionable while also able to remain pure. (Plus, astute readers will note the slyly slipped in ‘and men’ word-rufie, as if to imply devout muslim men have faced the exact same predicament as well. To which I say, bitch please.)
There was also a report from Dr Ali Ahmed Mashael, Grand Mufti at the Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department in Dubai, who explained that “women must be very careful and not believe claims from companies and saloons (sic), unless a fatwa comes from the right party.”
“If this is claimed to be a breathable nail polish which does not make a coat on the nail, a woman must try to peal(sic) it away. If it does not peal(sic), then yes it might be ‘halal’. However, if the woman tries to peal(sic) it and finds a pealed(sic) part coming out, then it is not ‘halal’, as it covers the nail and creates a shield on it. Thus, women cannot put it and pray.”
I hope Orly has also applied for the appropriate fatwas in this case.
(Is it just me or do Islamic clerics have more in common with the gay men they so love to condemn?)
And how was I finding out more from Halal Certification Departments and Grand Muftis about the very salient issues in nail polish science than I was from actual scientists?
The NYTimes would write about the inventor of this permeable nail polish, without, I might add, touting it’s muslim-friendly factor: “The Inglot nail polish, which borrows a polymer used in some contact lenses, comes in more than 45 hues, including unconventional ones like teal. The target audience? A woman who wears nail polish more often than not. “Traditional nail polish, wearing it day by day, week by week, isn’t necessarily healthy,” said Wojtek Inglot, the company founder.”
Clearly here was a product in search of a market, and even better if it could be perceived as solving a pressing problem amongst a minority group with disproportionate market share. Muslim women were being denied their right to manicures that lasted, were Islamic law compliant and also available in upto-the-minute shades. (And btw, NY Times, teal is so 2013, I don’t even have words.)
But it wouldn’t be until the following pseudoscientific study was conducted that all would be well in the direct-to-Islamic-Marketing world: Islamic scholar Mustafa Umar describes how he decided to “research” whether the product was consistent with Islamic law in the following manner.
He notes: “One of my students decided to perform a test to see whether or not water actually seeped through when using the Inglot O2M nail polish. As a test case, she applied standard pink nail polish and purple O2M on a coffee filter and allowed both to dry. She then placed another coffee filter below the painted one, squeezed two drops of water over the polish, and applied some pressure with her finger. After about ten seconds it was clear that the water was prevented from seeping through [even to the back side of the first filter] on the standard polish but clearly went through the O2M and even wet the second filter. This is sufficient to show that the claims made by the manufacturer are correct and water does indeed permeate through to the nail.”
What? It’s properly blinded if you have your student do it, isn’t it?
Aaah..close your eyes and you might be excused for thinking you were rapturously listening to a-hadith from the prophet’s closest science sahaba of the 7th Century.
There is also a chain of 21st Century ‘evidence’ complied in the hotly contested field of nail enamel science over the last 4 years, and I’m sure it will continue to grow, as non-issues tend to do, and serve to distract us from the real issues facing muslim women across the globe.
It’s almost like these new Hadith just write themselves, isn’t it?
Well glory be! Here was a problem that was being solved by technology! And it was so marketable as well. The optics for companies to get in on the diversity bandwagon with such a product must have had many a board room salivating over their pussy-hatjabs.
Halal products are a growing market and the women’s empowerment angle on this made it an instant crowd-pleaser: none other than Women’s March resident Sharia Law endorser-in-chief Linda Sarsour, would be featured in the Orly ad which ensures this product:
“caters to practicing muslims, is halal certified, and was created according to Sharia Law”
Yes, I have lived to see the day that being “created according to Sharia Law” would be a catchphrase touted as a positive in the United States of America.
Any discussion of halal nail polish, halal in this instance meaning ‘allowable’, needs an understanding of what ‘wudu’ stands for.
A ritual ablution before prayer, it is mentioned in the Quran (5:6) as “when you rise to [perform] prayer, wash your faces and your forearms to the elbows and wipe over your heads and wash your feet to the ankles.” and is supported by the Sunna of the prophet. Nowhere is there any requirement that water must touch every single nail, or that it was invalid should water fail to touch the nail.
There is, however, layered on top of many Islamic practices, this idea of purity, of avoiding ‘impurity’, which has its roots in pagan pre-Islamic concepts, and has no modern day equivalent. But that doesn’t stop muslims from refusing to enter homes that have dogs, as they are ‘impure’, or from believing that wudu with nail polish on was not going to be acceptable.
The dog issue has more to do with the Arabian notion of a dog as a lowly animal, since no such edict stands towards cats. Biofilm-wise both dogs and cats are about the same, and to hold such a strictly demarcated line between how one treats domesticated cats and dogs is a brand of magical thinking I would ask you to remember when thinking about this issue.
There are heated Mullah-certified opinions on this subject, for example Q&A site Islamqa.info notes: “But if it forms a layer that prevents water from reaching the nails, then it must be removed before doing wudoo’, because one of the conditions of wudoo’ being valid is that the water must reach all of the part of the body that is being washed and must touch it directly with no barrier in between. Going on to say: “If it is only moisture, that is not sufficient for wudoo’ to be valid, because one of the conditions of the validity of washing any part of the body in wudoo’ is that water should be able to flow over it, and it cannot be merely wiped with something damp.”
Askimam.org would note: “Wudhu’ is the basic requirement for one of the mightiest worship in Islam, the salah. If one is not cautious in securing one’s wudhu’, one would jeopardize this pillar of Islam. The issue of breathable nail-polish directly affects the validity of one’s wudhu’ and salah. Hence, caution is extremely important, especially at this stage when we do not have significant number of independent tests which would conclusively prove the permeability of such nail-polish. Moreover, there is always an option to use henna as an alternative means of beautification. Henna is recommended by Rasulullah salallahu alayhi wasallam himself, and Wudhu’ with the henna is also permissible.”
So magical thinking, notions of purity related to the idea of ‘touch’, along the lines of ‘untouchables’ in the Indian caste system, where purity is lost by accidental touch, and gained back by meticulous ablution, may seem only valid in the modern sense in movie scenes about OCD-related hand washing, because they certainly have no bearing in the real world of science.
And yet, here is modern pseudoscience, being used to prop up an idea from pre-history, an idea on its last legs in other cultures, but alive and well in Islam.
Helped along with a bit of marketing savvy, with words like “#haram-bae” and tag lines like “What the Fatima?”, Sharia-compliance is being made cool, edgy, even desirable.
