Easy Tips for Picture Perfect Cuticles and Nice Nails

Keeping your cuticles “picture perfect” is an easy way to make your home manicure look professional, Even if you don’t polish your nails, keeping your hands looking well-groomed is a really easy way to look put-together without taking that much effort. Alternatively, if you’re like me, and you like to post pictures of your manicure on the internet, you may have noticed that the macro setting on your camera makes your cuticles look like an emery board.

Moisturize! Dry cuticles peel but moisturize, and they will look fantastic within a few days. The trick is to moisturize them with something whenever you’re thinking about picking at them. I carry Burt’s Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Balm. Because I’m a reformed nail biter, whenever I get the tense urge to bite my nails, I moisturize my cuticles instead. (Think: smoker who tries to replace with gum-chewing.)

Mango Mend

Wear gloves when you wash your dishes (and other things)! Water will destroy your hands. Don’t listen to that dish soap commercial where the sponge thinks that the soap makes the lady’s hand sexy. It doesn’t. It just dries it up and makes you smell like dish soap. Do your dishes—that’s important. But just, invest in some plastic gloves. I also recommend dishes for gardening.Humans use tools! Please don’t use your nails to open things or rip off packaging. You will break your nail. And if you’re really unlucky, you will break it so it exposes skin and that will sting like fire the next time you try to make lemonade from scratch.

Burt’s Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Cream

Speaking of tools, the best nail file advice I ever got was to use a glass file. It’s less damaging than a metal file and less wasteful than an emery board. File in one direction (this is a lot harder than it sounds) instead of sawing back and forth. It’s better to file than cut but if you want to get rid of a lot of length all at once, it’s helpful to soak your hands first so the nail is a bit softer to cut. The other trick to filing your nails is to file your nails with nail polish on. It makes it easier to see if you’re shaping it the way that you envisioned in your head.

If you have any questions or nail polish requests, feel free to post them in the comments and I will use some of those (as many as possible, I’d love to answer all of your questions) as material for future posts. I also like trying nail art and will work on making some easy to follow tutorials for you. So consider this (first) post, “Total Request Tunamelt.”