Caviar nails equals caviaarrgh nails

Get a pack of trendy caviar nail gear. You know, a tiny kit with brush, pot of beads and base coat. The beads are beautiful. They are Christmas in miniature: dozens of tiny baubles. They are a city when viewed at night – nothing but lights. They are a complex underwater metropolis, a growth as seen under a microscope, they are hundreds and thousands spread on garishly coloured icing.

Put the nail caviar on. Admire the effect. The regret is going to set in pretty soon. Oh yes, here it is.

You are now in a world of snagging and catching. To go to bed is to sleep with dozens of beads which fall off your dominant hand and go rolling around on the mattress with you. Try a shower. Attempt to clean your body manually and feel that rough texture in all the wrong places. Floss your teeth - every time you push waxed white thread between your teeth there's a pinging sound as two, three, four beads drop into your mouth (don't swallow).

The beads will go everywhere. They will bounce around like excited particles. They will remain stuck to your fingertips for, oh, an hour maybe. It's common to glance down and find they have vanished en masse, leaving behind a silver pockmark where a bead used to be.

The fresh caviar manicure makes you think of genteel times or of a future in which you are similarly incapacitated. In either case, you will need a handmaid, someone to wait on you in every sense of the word, someone with unmanicured fingers with which to personally floss my teeth for me, clean bodily crevices and so on.

Don’t use this product if: you are a nurse, surgeon, dental hygienist, pastry chef, or anyone in the service industry. Or in zero gravity in space – the beads would clog your instruments.

Do use it if: you are going to a dazzling cocktail party, you are a hand model, you enjoy abrasive surfaces.

In one sentence: Argh, when can I get this off me?!