Nail Health and How to Heal Nails
“My nails are so thin and brittle - I’ve tried everything. I need help.” Many of our first time clients exasperatedly say, as soon as they settle down into their chairs at the salon. They’ve tried fixes they’ve come across on the Internet and suggestions from friends but none have quite been the solution they’ve hoped for.
Especially for women, damaged nails can be a source of embarrassment, confusion, and anxiety, negatively affecting our professional and personal lives. Through our decade-plus track record of healing and beautifying our clients’ nails, we’re here to guide you through the most common nail problems and their signs that we’ve come across and how to heal them.
Why You Don't Have to Give Up Hope
At Atelier Anaiis, we think of nails as grand city gates, protecting us by barring bacteria from entering our bloodstream. We see nail health as an integral part of our overall health plan and wellbeing, and no matter their current condition, we’re here to help rehabilitate your nails.
How do we do this? You can learn more about our philosophy on how to heal nails through our Redefining Nail Care post.
Table of Contents
Why You Don’t Have to Give Up Hope
Previous Application of Regular Nail Polish and Acrylic Powder
Previous Use of E-Files
At Atelier Anaiis, we don’t use electric nail files, also known as E-files and nail drills. Why? E-files serve a single purpose - to get clients in and out of the door as quickly as possible so that the salon can buzz through as many clients as possible to maximize their revenue. What does this look like in the context of a manicure appointment? Using E-files to create the half-moon shape in your cuticles without taking the time to actually care for cuticles properly; using E-files to remove nail polish without spending the time to properly soak off the product. In the hunt for a quick buck, the use of e-files ignores safety for the client. No matter how trained and experienced the nail tech thinks they are, e-files - with its uncontrollable speed and pressure they puts on the nail bed - are harbingers of disaster with a split second being all that it takes to cause irreparable damage. It’s not a matter of “if” the e-file will damage your nails - it’s a matter of “when.”
Thin nails, brittle nails, uneven nails, bendy nails, and discolored nails can all be caused by previous use of E-files. These visible signs of nail health problems are followed by less visible ones, like nails being sensitive to temperature and pressure, not to mention the psychological consequences of exasperation, anxiety, and embarrassment.
The first and most crucial step to recovering from the use of E-files is to stop its use completely. Since most salons use E-files, you as the client are tasked with the responsibility of vocalizing your request at your appointment that the nail technician does not use an E-file on you. If they refuse, empower yourself to walk away. The damage is never worth it.
Previous Application of Regular Nail Polish and Acrylic Powder
When you walk into a nail salon near you, are you greeted by fumes of chemicals? This is the combined smell of regular nail polish and acrylic products - and applying either to your nails is a grave mistake.
To talk about these two common types of product, we need a quick primer on what our nails are made of in the first place. Our nails are composed of hundreds of layers of cells made from keratin, the same protein that protects our hair and skin.
Let’s first talk about regular nail polish, the most common of all products used in manicures at nail salons. Unlike gel polish and other nail enhancement techniques that require the use of curing lamps, regular polish, once applied on the nails, will soak directly into the nail plate. This means that the chemicals and toxins contained in it will land squarely on your bare keratin layers, allowing the chemicals to penetrate those layers, wreaking havoc deeper and deeper until they reach your nail matrix.
For the acrylic nail process, a dehydrator is first applied, its purpose to dehydrate, or strip the natural oils from the nail to make the acrylic powder stay on the nail. This is a short-term solution - with repeated stripping of the nail’s natural oils, it becomes more difficult for the nail to hold the acrylic powder, leading to increased dosage of the dehydrator and increasingly brittle nails. After the dehydrator, a primer is applied. The primer signals the beginning of the most damaging part of the entire acrylic nail process - the part when a monomer liquid containing acrylic monomers bonds with polymers in acrylic powders. This liquid has an extremely sharp and pungent smell, and over time as it touches the skin around your nails, you can develop all kinds of skin diseases and conditions. For both clients and technicians, the risk factor from being around acrylic nails increases over time. Additionally, for clients getting acrylic refills, if the nail technician doesn’t remove the part of the nail that’s lifting from the original set properly, water could get trapped, leading to fungal growth on the nail. If the nail fungal condition is allowed to keep worsening without treatment, it can permanently destroy your nail plate. We have seen clients who nearly lost their entire nail plate because of a fungal infection. To make matters worse with acrylic refills, the technician has to use an e-file to reshape the acrylic. As we talked about in the section above regarding Previous Use of E-files, there’s too much heat and pressure applied to the nail plate and cuticles during this process that causes severe nail problems.
The physical signs of nail damage from both regular nail polish and acrylic powder include the peeling of skin around the nails, white spots on the nails, yellowing nails, brittle texture of nails, splitting nails, and cracked nails.
At Atelier Anaiis, we’re proponents of the use of gel nail polish. You can imagine gel polish as a piece of plastic that, once cured properly, doesn’t soak into your nail plate. It hardens on top of and around the base coat applied on the nail plate, providing protection for the entire nail with the condition that all prepping steps are completed properly, from removing old products on the top layer of the nail, to properly detaching those layers, to removing cuticle from your eponychium, and removal of hangnails to prevent infection. At our nail salon, 75% of our process is nail care (including cuticle care, talked about in the next section), while 25% of it is the proper application of gel polish to protect, heal, and enhance your nails.
If you’d rather stop the use of nail polish altogether to take a break, that’s an option too - if your heart is set on that, read on to find out why cuticle care is the most essential ingredient for nail health and solving your nail problems.
Lack of Cuticle Care
When most people talk about cuticle care, they’re referring to the quick pushing back of cuticles. Cuticle care is more than that - the taking care of cuticles, the dead skin by-product of the nail plate growing out of the nail matrix, involves numerous steps. Looking at the image provided above, we see that the cuticle is the thin section in white, right above the nail matrix. The primary purpose of cuticle care is to safely detach the cuticles from the proximal nail fold (also known as the eponychium) and the lateral nail fold, which make up the nail walls. Why is this important? Because as the nail plate grows out, should the cuticle still be attached to the folds, it will pull on them, resulting in your skin splitting and causing painful hangnails. Why is it important to treat hangnails? Hangnails don’t go away on their own and should the hangnails be allowed to continue existing (an idea that makes us shudder just to think about), it serves as an open invitation to bacteria to enter and destroy the nail matrix over time through infection. We see this often affecting clients who have never had cuticle care done properly, regardless of whether they have nail polish applied regularly or not.
The reason that most clients are unaware of the multiple levels of cuticle care is because they’ve never had it done in depth. The majority of nail salons choose to skip it because of how involved it is - the entire cuticle care process must be done with just the right amount of pressure from the tools so as to not damage the nail matrix, in combination with the correct products. Most of all, to do cuticle care well, it requires time - time that the majority of nail technicians just don’t have, due to the revolving door nature of how their nail salons operate and how quickly they must finish each manicure to accommodate the next.
Done properly, cuticle care tackles a multitude of nail health problems, from the splitting of nails, to peeling nail polish, to the habit of biting nails, to hangnails bleeding and leading to an infection. Cuticle care will ensure nail health as we age too - through the years, our nails naturally change shape and texture to cope with the pressure applied to them through daily tasks and the environment. How we use our hands at work, in the garden, in the kitchen - all of these tasks affect how our nails age and regular appointments for cuticle care paves the road for healthy nails. Even if you don’t ever opt for nail polish, cuticle care is foundational for nail health.
Peeling Nails, Biting Nails, and Nail Trauma
If the previous use of e-files, application of regular nail polish and acrylic powders, and lack of cuticle care are matters that could be attributed to the nail salon of your choice and largely out of your control as the client, the habit of peeling nails, biting nails, and nail trauma are aspects of nail health that are completely and solely in your control. Nail health is a team game - even when a manicure is done safely with the correct products, that is only 50% of the equation. As the client, you have to actively participate in the caring of your nails.
The habit of peeling nail polish, along with bits of your natural nails, is a direct result of poor nail care. First, let’s talk about what causes peeling nails, once you get a manicure - for this section, we assume that the issue is not correlated with nutrient deficiency. Hot water use, whether through hand washing or showering is a chief culprit here. Let’s imagine our nails and the keratin layers as a book: imagine soaking the book in water, then allowing it to air dry. What do we see over time? As moisture is stripped from its pages, the texture changes from what it was originally - use of hot water leads to an even more exaggerated result. This is what happens to nails through hot water and over time, the structural integrity of the nail polish and the natural nails could be compromised, leading to peeling nails.
Next we talk about what could go wrong during a manicure to cause peeling nails. When any part of cuticle care is skipped, as we see so often at nail salons, or when a product - whether it’s regular polish, acrylic powder, or gel polish - is not cured properly during a manicure, water can enter the space between your natural nails and the applied product, lifting it off of your nail. What do we mean when we say, “cured properly”? Proper curing involves depth (how deep your hands and fingers go into the curing lamp), position (how flat and centered your hand is in the curing lamp), and time (how long they cure for). The bump that results from improper curing often emerges within a week of the manicure and is uncomfortable for clients, who consciously or unconsciously pick at it in an attempt to get rid of the bump. This breaks the seal applied on the nails and eventually the bump is forcibly removed, along with precious layers of your natural nails. What you’re left with is increasingly peeling nails.
Nail trauma - accidentally hitting your fingers and nails on a hard surface or giving yourself unintentional cuts to the nail bed and nail matrix - is often unavoidable in the course of life. Depending on the nature and force of the injury, the nail matrix could be damaged, leading to misshapen nails, broken nails, or even losing the nail plate.
But biting nails is perhaps the worst enemy to nail health, a constant step-back that nullifies any positive step-forwards in a nail rehabilitation journey. Often having seemingly-innocent roots in trying to get rid of hangnails, biting nails can become a subconscious coping mechanism for stress and an unstoppable habit.
Both nail trauma and biting nails seem like nail health problems that cannot be helped by what the best nail salons offer. But in our professional experience, proper cuticle care and careful prepping of the nails prior to application of polish are the most important and foundational elements that put you on the road to healing from both issues. We have many clients whose nail matrix was protected by the hardened gel polish layers that stayed on without peeling (thanks to careful nail prep) when they had an accident at the cutting board in the kitchen at home, and we also have many clients who once had the habit of biting nails before coming to us. With our help, all of these clients have healed their natural nails with no hint of previous nail issues. Today, these women enjoy the beauty and strength of their natural nails without the need for extensions, and without having nail pain.
At-Home Nail Kits
At-home nail kits have continued to garner business from people because their proposition seems really attractive and simple. “Long lasting nails that rival a set from a nail salon at half the price, all from the comfort of your home!” For those of you that have encountered any of the nail health problems we’ve discussed so far, sick and tired of the nail damage you’ve endured, we can understand why you may reach for at-home nail kits. Surely you, who knows your own body best, can do a better job caring for your nails than some nail salon that just treats you as a number. But as the last stop for clients who have been on a long journey to heal their nails, we’ve seen first hand the damage that at-home nail kits can cause.
The biggest issue that at-home nail kits face is the learning curve that you, as the user, face. Even for ones marketed as “nail kits for beginners,” there is a steep learning curve to giving yourself a manicure. (Here we’ll assume that you’re not even considering something as preposterous as having girlfriends give you a manicure at home for a relaxing girl’s night. Would you trust those same friends to give you a root canal or to do a cosmetic procedure on you? We didn’t think so.) To bring the point home, none of our nail technicians at Atelier Anaiis, with all of their experience and expertise, dare to give themselves a manicure with the professional tools and products from the nail salon, let alone an at-home nail kit.
Let’s start with the soak off process for at-home nail kits, to remove any product previously applied. Immediately, we encounter the cause of chemical burns on nails and fingers, perhaps the most common problem we see with clients who have tried at-home nail kits, leaving them with sensitive and raw skin around their nails. The components of at-home nail kits - including the formula for the soak off solution, instructions for pushing back cuticles, and the base included - are necessarily created for a single client who serves as a prototype in the production of the nail kits. We say “necessarily” because it’s impossible for a company to individually customize its product for each customer who buys a kit. This is to say that if you happen to fit the particular data set the kit was created for, the nail kit could work for you. But most likely, you won’t, considering the mind-boggling number of different factors affecting each client’s nails. Imagine opening a shoe box to find size 10 mules, and you’re expected to make that particular pair work for you, regardless of your actual shoe size. Looked at from another perspective, at Atelier Anaiis, all components of a manicure - from the base, the way we do cuticle care, the curing process, to the gel polish used - are all adjusted for every client’s particular nail condition. In addition, each brand of gel nail polish requires different curing times, each curing lamp has a different output, and you - as the user of at-home nail kits - have never had the chance to learn any of those things.
The only way to learn how to give yourself a manicure through at-home nail kits is to serve as your own guinea pig. Regardless of how careful you may be, the first time you use an at-home nail kit is always a disaster, nearly always damaging your nail plate, cuticles, and the skin around the nails. The dilemma you face is that you only have a very finite number of nail layers, and damage to a single keratin layer takes weeks to heal from with diligent and appropriate care. From our perspective, no one has the luxury of extra keratin layers to experiment with by giving themselves a manicure.
As we discussed in the section, Lack of Cuticle Care, in our experience, cuticle care is absolutely foundational for nail health. If you’re set on stopping nail polish application altogether, our professional advice is to skip the at-home nail kits in favor of having cuticle care done professionally, not through at-home cuticle care kits. Our cuticle care service at Atelier Anaiis starts at $45, with recommendations for clients to return every two to three weeks.
Conclusion
The common nail health problems and the process of how to heal nails that we’ve outlined in this post is not a “How to heal nails fast” article. In our more than decade-long professional experience, it can take anywhere from six months to three years of patient, diligent care to change habits to heal and rehabilitate your natural nails. But taken step by step with each passing day, your damaged nails can be healed. We strongly advise you to be skeptical of those that tell you that they, whether they’re a nail salon or an Internet source, can quickly fix your damaged nails - they are usually speaking confidently about something for which the net convincing evidence is minor to lure you into their business.
If you’re looking for a salon that specializes in nail health and nail care and you’re in the Old City neighborhood or the Philadelphia area, our team is here for you. Contact us.
