Every Saturday of my childhood, I had a standing lunch date with my grandparents.

My maternal grandfather, James Joseph Farrell, wore a suit to lunch with a nine-year-old. My Nana sat right beside him, and between the two of them the meal became an event. Linen tablecloths. Waiters who called me sir before I had earned it. My sister Jill and I took turns choosing the restaurant, one week hers and one week mine, and I always picked the fanciest room in Toledo so I could order a Shirley Temple like I owned the place. Nana finished every one of those lunches with a Grasshopper, mint green and cold, and she always let me sneak a taste.

He taught me about food. About cars and restaurants. He put Jill and me on our first airplane, Toledo to Chicago, one overnight that felt like crossing an ocean. Mostly he taught me a standard. The way you show up says something before you open your mouth.

Part of that standard was his hands.

My grandfather got manicures. He used lotion. He wanted hands that looked like they closed deals, not hands that closed valves. Executive hands, not the rough hands of a tradesman. I say that without a drop of contempt, because the other men who raised me earned those rough hands honestly.

My father was a firefighter. My other grandfather was a firefighter.

Their hands told the truth about their work, and it was good work.

Two kinds of hands, two kinds of men, both taking care of what they had. I noticed the difference early, and I noticed which one I was drawn to.

So I inherited the care.

For most of my life that meant a buff and a shine. Clear. Clean.

Polished in a way no one would ever comment on, because the whole point was that no one would comment on it. I

ran stores for Disney and Gap and Claire's, businesses built entirely on image, and my own image stayed inside the lines the whole time. My hands matched the code I had been handed. Groomed to belong.

Then, about a year ago, I started wearing color.

It began with the wedding. Joe and I married in September 2025 at a vineyard, and somewhere in all the preparation I found myself in the chair asking for more than a buff. Something shifted. The color did not come off after the party. Now I change it every two or three weeks, and I look forward to it the way I once looked forward to those Saturday lunches. Same salon. Same techs who know my name. Joe and I often go together and make it ours.

The part I sat with for a while is this. I spent an entire career curating how things looked, for some of the most recognizable brands on earth, and I did not let my own hands say a single word until I was sixty. It took marrying Joe to hand me the permission I had been withholding from myself.

The strange thing is, the culture was already moving toward me.

Jared McCain, now with the Oklahoma City Thunder, started painting his nails during the pandemic after watching another player do it. He wore black polish across the 2024 NBA Draft stage and took real heat from fans for it. Instead of scrubbing it off, he turned it into a nail polish line with Sally Hansen, the brand's first ever NIL deal, signed while he was still at Duke. Carmelo Anthony, a Hall of Famer, waved off the critics and said to let the young guys be themselves. Harry Styles built a whole cosmetics brand, Pleasing, around the same idea.

This is not a fad chasing a few athletes. NielsenIQ put US men's grooming at roughly $7.1 billion in 2025, up almost 7 percent in a single year, with online sales climbing more than 27 percent. Close to six in ten men now say they buy grooming products, according to a recent Gallup poll, to take care of how they look over time.

If you think a man in colored nails is something new, you have the history backwards. In ancient Egypt, men stained their nails with henna to signal power and wealth.

Wealthy men in Ming Dynasty China wore black and red. Babylonian warriors are said to have groomed and colored their nails before battle, with the shade marking their rank. For most of recorded time, well kept and colored nails read as elite and male. The idea that nail color belongs only to women is the recent invention, not the polish. My grandfather understood the impulse better than he knew. He was already doing the ancient thing, taking visible, deliberate care of his hands as a statement of who he was.

So what does any of this have to do with leadership?

My grandfather taught me that presentation is a discipline. What he could not teach me, because he lived inside it, is that the definition of acceptable presentation is inherited. Someone made it up. It moves. The line between professional and unprofessional, between serious and frivolous, between a man's grooming and a woman's, is not carved in stone. It is a code, and codes get rewritten. He used the discipline to fit the code. I use the same discipline to stretch it. Same care, opposite direction.

I will be honest about my position. Nobody is going to remove me from a board over a coat of Point Guard Pink. I have decades of standing and a marriage that celebrates me, and that safety is exactly the point. When you have room, you are supposed to use it to make more room. There is a twenty-six-year-old somewhere reading the same quiet signals I read at nine, deciding which parts of himself are allowed at the office. My job, and yours if you lead anyone, is to widen that doorway so he does not have to wait until he is sixty and married to walk through it.

Those quiet signals have a source. Most of the workplaces I came up in ran on what I have started calling convenient kindness. Everyone is welcome, warmly and sincerely, right up until someone stretches the code and a client raises an eyebrow. Then the room goes quiet, and the twenty-six-year-old learns exactly how far the welcome extends. Radical kindness works the other way. It holds the standard, which is the care, and it stays with the person when the code moves, on the day that is easy and on the day it costs something. I will have more to say about the difference in a few weeks.

I still take care of my hands the way my grandfather taught me. I kept the care. I changed the color. He would have raised an eyebrow, then asked me where I get it done, and probably booked the next chair.

Do the work to look and feel like yourself.

Then hold the door for the next person who is not yet sure they are allowed to.

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