Hello everyone. As you may know, this is part 2 of a series I wanted to share part of the process of going from biting my nails, to healthy nails. So... picking up where I left off... Okay, I've stopped my habit of biting, my nails have grown a bit stronger, and my cuticles are starting to look moisturized... great! But my nails were still chipping and peeling, and they were sooo yellow! What could I do next to improve the health of my nails? To read Part 1 of this blog, please click here. Once you take care of the bigger problems, you start seeing the smaller ones, and I think that is true of all situations. Things I started noticing were how my nails were very yellow, they were really hard, and they were really curved. I didn't know if that was normal, but I thought that it must be a good thing, since they used to be paper thin. However, my nails chipped and peeled easily. They were so dry and brittle... something I had never experienced, or knew how to fix, since I had never really had long nails before. So, it turned out that nail strengtheners mean nail hardeners, and nails are supposed to be somewhat flexible. Also, I hated how much acetone dried out my nails, and how brittle and scratchy they felt afterwards. I feel like acetone would draw out the pigment from the polishes, and drive that pigment into the pores of my nails, depositing a bit of color each time I removed polish. I couldn't give up acetone though. It was too important (and fast... and convenient). So...basically, I wanted to stop needing to use strengtheners, AND not have to use so much acetone. There were a lot of people talking about peel off base coats at this time, and it was something big on IG. I believe OPI came up with a new peel off base coat meant to be used for glitter polishes, and then of course there was the option of using glue as a base. Well, I could never find the OPI peel off base coat, and for some reason, I could never get the glue done right.I finally decided to purchase Yellow Stopper from Sally's, as it was recommended, and used, by many on IG For those of you who may not know about Yellow Stopper, these are a few details about it:
Using Yellow Stopper helped me by:
So I stopped using strengthening base coats. I understand that some people may need to use them and will have different results than I did, so please keep that in mind. My nails became softer, healthier, with nicer color to them, and definitely a huge decrease in the yellowing. I was so proud at this point of the HUGE improvement from where I started, and honestly, my nails were very healthy!!! They became so strong, and were finally growing fast. The only thing was the little chips on the corners of my nails. It feels like there wasn't a day that my nails weren't chipped somewhere... until about 10 months ago. So what did I do different? My nails wend from square, to round. That's it! (I guess corners breaking is automatically eliminated, since there are no corners to be broken off... LOL). My friend Donna, remember her, from Sweet Baby by Donna, shared with me some information in regards to nail shapes. Basically, everyone's nails are shaped different. From cuticle shapes, to nail bed shapes, to the matrix of our nails, to the curvature of our nails, length wise and width wise, to the things that we do to take care of our little nail cells. Basically, round nails work best for my nail type! I understand this might not be the solution for everyone, but at least know that if you just cannot get rid of that constant small corner chipping, consider changing the shape of your nail a bit. Start slowly if you don't want some drastic change, or if you think you really don't want to get into a shape that is different from square. Also, I know that my nails will eventually have a break... I mean, sometimes I hit surfaces pretty hard on accident and actually wonder how it DIDN"T break?! Of course, maintenance is highly important. Nails don't keep themselves healthy on their own. So I am going to share my nail care routine on Part 3 of this post :). In the meantime, I chose to share some of my early works... just in case you thought I was kidding ;) Enjoy! Thanks for reading
<3 Mely
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