What Does a Square Manicure Say About Your Personality?

Square or rectangular nail tips represent Earth energy and support working toward your material goals.

They add stability, endurance, and structure. In this post we’ll discuss:

• The meaning of the square nail plate
• Short versus long square tips
• The esoteric significance of 90s nail trends
• And the current findings from my ongoing research study on astrology placements and nail shape preferences

Square Nail Plate

Nail shapes are categorized by the elements: Fire, Air, Water, Earth. Square and rectangular nails, whether referring to the nail plate or the tip, represent Earth. In my nail reading book, I describe square nails as follows:

“They like to plan, organize, commit, build and make things happen. Square nails reveal a balanced, stable, pragmatic personality. They can also be dogmatic, stubborn, and creatures of habit. They are good at planning and excel at activities that require analytical and technical mastery, like crochet, engineering, woodworking, and coding.”

The Ancient Art of Onychomancy In the Modern World

True square nail plates are quite rare. I mostly see them on men. Most people with Earth nails have rectangular nails, which are more Yin or feminine in polarity.

Short to Medium Square Nails

This is my own hand – I’ve burnt the tip of my right thumbnail so many times this week (a whole other divination topic), making my thumbnail shorter and shorter. And then it chipped off in an odd way so I decided to take it as a sign this nail just wants to be straight: Shapeshifting from round (Air) to square (Earth).

I don’t usually have deadlines because I intentionally organize my life to have a lot of flow and wiggle room, but I actually have an unusual amount to do in a short period of time right now so it’s a good time to pull back, get grounded, and put in the work, which this shape facilitates. As we see in the video “100 Years of Nails” by Allure, in this section on nail trends in the 1940s, “Women’s nails got shorter as they entered the workforce.” Exactly!

https://youtu.be/OFzBw14XjXM

The Meaning of Long Square Acrylics

Square are stable and secure. And so square tips create a secure container for our ephemeral mental energies represented by the fingertips in general. The most grounded, stabilizing shape is a short square nail, and the longer the shape, the more yin and receptive to external energies this shape becomes.

Square nails are about your material reality. If you want to really focus on yourself and your material reality and get a lot of physical work done, do short square nails. If you want to focus on your material reality but via a more detached, luxurious vibe, do longer square nails.

You can literally “feel” out the energy of the different nails shapes by noticing how they cause you come into contact with the world around you differently. For example with almond and oval nails, which are the social Air element, the shape is buffered and so you have a softer landing that is especially pleasant for contact with others; with square nails, you have the most surface contact with the physical, or Earth, realm.

It’s also worth noting that you literally feel more through long nails. When I tap longer nails on a hard surface, I can feel the vibration more acutely in the nail bed, versus when they’re shorter it’s a duller sensation. This translates to the data that our nails receive as energetic transmitters as well.

Square Nails in the 90s

It’s no coincidence that nails in the 90s, which were an economically booming time, were very square, whether it was in the style of Foxy Brown’s long square tips with airbrushed metallic nail art, Scary Spice’s black square nails with accent pinkies, or Courtney Love’s short, dark, chipped grunge nails:

The 90s were also the first Dot Com boom. Remember earlier I said square nails “excel at activities that require planning, analytical and technical mastery, like…coding.” Furthermore, when the value of the stock market is growing, it’s called a “bull market” — and the bull is the symbol of the Earth sign Taurus. Plus, in the Allure video, the manicure they feature as an example of 90s nails uses literal currency in the design:

Astrology & Nail Preferences

Last month I asked my Twitter folks, “What is your favorite nail shape and what are your sidereal big 3?” If you don’t know your sidereal astrology placements, check out my post How to Create a Free Sidereal Chart (with Interpretations). And I haven’t got quite enough responses yet to draw clear conclusions, but so far there is a VERY strong correlation between sidereal Earth sun and moon signs loving square nails. You can participate in my ongoing study in this 1-minute survey.

If you’d like to support my blog and leave a tip, you can do so here:

And finally, a big shout out to Press Ons by Shad, a lovely press on nail business out of Antigua, for providing the illustration photo of this gorgeous jewel tone blue square nail set:

Thanks for reading! How do you feel about square nails?

Pin this image: