One afternoon a couple of years ago, I overheard a conversation in a nail bar between a technician and a customer. At the table next to me they were discussing the latest Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel is played by the mixed-race actor Halle Bailey.
They talked about the controversy surrounding her casting. The technician remarked, “I don’t think she’s right for the part, but not for the reason everybody says. She just doesn’t look, to me, how I imagined the character.”
I remember my mixed feelings at the time about whether to comment on the layers I thought could have sat beneath the surface of the discussion. It stung a little to hear as a person of mixed heritage myself, and yet I also felt curious, especially as each converser potentially also appeared non-white.
I also appreciated, then and now, that they might have had their own relationship with their positioning, identity-wise, culturally and ethnically. I decided not to interject.
At the time it felt like a fairly inconsequential exchange, and even less important than the wider struggles taking place in the UK, and within a small, socially, ethnically and economically diverse, yet predominantly white area.
The conversation I listened to took place inside the confines of a busy nail salon, an apparently successful business and a bubble of relative privilege. Outside, on the narrow high street, an increasingly large crowd of people of varying ages and walks of life made cheerful small talk as they gathered, waiting. They encroached in front of the window enough to be distracting.
“Why are they queuing?” the customer asked.
They were waiting for the community food bank to open, which had been distributing food one day a week since the pandemic.
While I chose my nail shape and colour, it was jarring to see just how many local people were struggling to make ends meet because of the rising cost of living, potentially representing a tiny fraction of the 2.6 million food parcels distributed in the UK recently, 45% more than before the pandemic. Meanwhile, myself and other customers were breezily paying for nail and other beauty services costing no less than £30 a pop. The wealth disparities within that small vicinity quickly became an elephant in the room.
Looking back, had I not been so lost in the incongruence of all of these observations, I think I might have asked: When you imagine Ariel, does the image in your mind reflect the European beauty standards established by the earlier versions of the film?
The discussion about Ariel’s ethnicity brought me back to a moment from childhood, when I remember discovering that a book character I identified with was African-American. It was one of the moments I realised I was brown and how I felt about it. Now I have the language to express that I had internalised Eurocentrism as the standard, and how that led me, at the time, to reject my skin tone. This process can play-out subtly and quietly for all of us regardless of our ethnicity or appearance, influencing what we accept as as the ‘central’ or ‘standard’ or ‘natural’, order of things and what we see as ‘other’.
I don’t have clear memories of all the preceding small moments that led me to internalise this structure as a millennial growing up in the UK. They were probably too ordinary, too subtle and too frequent to notice individually. Yet together they lead up to that moment reading my book, adding to the way I felt about myself when young, through what I saw and experienced.
Perhaps something similar but inverse had less noticeably happened within each converser, a sense that it wasn’t possible to see Halle Bailey as Ariel, an imagined character. Perhaps because previous depictions of a white Ariel had become so familiar, that they came to define how she ‘should‘ look. Familiarity conflated with certainty. Certainty prompting othering.
Sitting there, many different versions of the same human survival strategy struck me. The situations could not have been more different, yet all seemed connected to seeking familiarity or certainty. All brought me back to the same thoughts.
Inside the nail shop, perhaps security was sought through clutching onto an old image of a fictional character. Outside, it was hoped for through a food donation.
For myself and other customers getting our nails done, perhaps it was also in the routine and comfort of grooming and appearance.
A microcosm of the range of ways we can consciously or automatically respond, (or are forced to), when our world feels so unpredictable.
© 2026 Lorraine Welch. All rights reserved
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