Scientist Hijacks Seventeen Magazine’s #ManicureMonday hashtag on Twitter.
At the beginning of each week, Seventeen magazine encourages women and girls to tweet pictures of their done-up fingernails under #ManicureMonday. But if you searched the hashtag yesterday in hopes of finding some bedazzled inspiration, you were in for quite a surprise. Seemingly all at once, scientists hijacked #ManicureMonday with their own images of fingernails interacting with ghost crabs, keyboards, shark bait, and coyote scat….
Hope Jahren is the scientist who single-handedly orchestrated the coup. Jahren works as an isotope geochemist and laboratory scientist studying photosynthesis at the University of Hawaii Manoa. She got the idea a week ago when autocomplete suggested she tweet something under the #ManicureMonday tag. Once she figured out what the French tip that was, she hatched a plan to hijack the hashtag.
“Seventeen magazine has 700,000 followers,” said Jahren, “and it’s my dream they’ll retweet one of these images to show their followers, presumably a lot of girls, that it’s about what their hands do—not about how they look.”
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