I tried on my new top with one of my older skirts to see how they'd look together. While attempting to tuck the shirt in, I jammed my left pinky against the shirt and my nail bent backwards so badly that the nail cracked halfway across, a few millimeters below the hyponychium. Yowch!
Luckily, I'd been wearing a peel-off base coat so I didn't have to put acetone on the fresh wound. Also luckily, I was done with my chores for the day and had planned on redoing my nails after trying on my clothes, so I had plenty of time to patch up the break! I used a small piece of tea bag and a few layers of nail glue to hold the two pieces of nail together...
... then I painted my nails as I usually would. Two layers of base coat, a layer of white, two layers of sponged-on polish for the gradient, and two layers of top coat. (for better photos of this manicure, see yesterday's post!)
I figured that the tea bag, combined with the many layers of glue and polish, would be enough to last at least until the break grew above the hyponichium. Nope. The layers of stuff holding my nail together split while I was digging my clothes out of the dryer the very next night. I shouldn't have used my left hand for that :( It was too late at night for me to want to deal with new wet layers, so I put a Band-Aid over my finger to hold everything together while I slept.
By the next afternoon, the polish on the top half of my nail had chipped off, revealing the break in the nail. The once-neat white line of my hyponichium was now jagged and awkward.
I removed the polish - which luckily didn't hurt, because the wound of my torn skin had healed by then - and decided to use a Jamberry nail wrap to hold it together. A nail wrap can't split the way polish can, after all, so it should be a good hold! And Tropical Mirage matched my neon gradient pretty well.
Well, that would have worked, except that I made the mistake of putting some nail glue on my nail before applying the wrap. Apparently, that prevented my wrap from being able to form a perfect seal on my nail, and after a few days, it started peeling up around the edges.
By the next weekend, which was Memorial Day weekend, the wrap was almost completely lifted off of my nail - except, to its credit, for the part that was directly over the original break in my nail.
I was on vacation with my family in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that weekend, and I didn't have a bunch of tools with me. I'd had the foresight to at least pack my nail clippers, file, an orangewood stick, and my base and top coat just in case. Luckily, I had enough time after breakfast on Saturday to tend to my nail while everyone fought for shower time. (One of my favorite parts of being a night showerer!) I pried the wrap off to discover my nail had broken on the other corner, too. It was hanging on by a thread of skin in the middle, not unlike a loose tooth hanging on by one little root that lets you spin it around in your mouth.
The one bright side was that the newer break had the courtesy to be above my hyponichium, so at least that wasn't a fresh wound or a break that would further ruin the shape of my white line!
So, without the tools or time to try to save the nail again, I chopped it off.
The weirdness on the surface of my nail is just the nail glue that got partially torn up by the Jamberry wrap. And the small amount of free edge was pretty rough, so I filed it down nice and flat.
And that, my friends, is the end of this sad story. Every time I looked at my finger for a few days, I felt like someone had chopped it off at the tip! I don't even know how long it's been since I had absolutely no free edge on my nails.
Until the nail grows out long enough for me to shape it to match the rest of my nails, I'm going to keep it out of photos. I think it looks really silly in my usual pose, all short and stubby! Although it's been three weeks since the initial break, I still don't have enough growth to get my pointed round shape. And I absolutely refuse to cut down the rest of my nails to even closely match this one!
No comments:
Post a Comment