Nails - trials and tribulations....

I have not paid much attention to all the anguished posts about nails, fake nails, filing nails, nail shape etc recently.  Not that I don't care, it's just that I seemed to be doing OK - providing I took care to keep them smooth, my nails stayed the same length and the tone I was getting worked for me ( and apparently my teacher, though it is possible he was just holding his comments while I dealt with more egregious problems).  Then in April I was doing some plumbing _ um, that's a fancy term for clearing a blocked sink - and I put my right hand down the drain to dig around.   I know it should have been the other hand, or even a tool,  but hindsight is a terrible thing.  Anyway, the inevitable happened - my water-softened i finger lost a huge chunk of nail.  This was especially bad because our final orchestra performance was coming up in May and there was no way it would grow back in time.

Desperate times call for desperate measures in the shower

What to do?   I was pretty convinced I wasn't going to use toxic glues that would soak into the nail and reduce it to the consistency of tissue paper.     Then I found some great self-stick nails - (KISS brand, - not the other ones which are soft, thick, sound awful and won't stay on).  Easy to stick and shape, produce great tone and the glue is kind of rubbery and rolls off when they eventually start to separate from the underlying nail a day or three later (they do come off if you get them wet though, so showering requires innovative finger covers - fingers chopped off rubber gloves with elastic bands worked well).  Yes I kept them on for a few days each time and kept replacing them.  As I said, hindsight is a terrible thing.  So I got through the orchestra performance fine (at least as far as nails went) - each time the stick-ons came off however, I found it necessary to smooth out the underlying nail quite a lot.  I didn't pay much attention until a couple of months had gone by and I STILL had no nails (I was actually using the stick-ons on 2 nails at this point because I had gone to town with the file on my m finger too).  Then it occurred to me what was happening - the real nail was getting chopped up on the underside of the fake nail so I was smoothing out any growth each time I changed the fake nail.  Duh.   Once I realized this I decided I would have to go fake-nail free and just tough it out until they grew back.

A few weeks later  - now we are in July, yikes! -  it was apparent this wasn't working so well either.   Problem being I wear my nails down at roughly the same rate as they grow. If they are at the right length that's fine - a gentle smoothing with micromesh paper (really you should use it, it's the best!) and occasional shaping does the trick. Now though, as soon as they started to get long enough to catch slightly on the guitar strings - that's the length they stayed.   More interventions required.  I figured taping them while practicing might work, but darned if I couldn't get anything to stick.  I didn't have any nails to wrap painters tape (as suggested by David Russell in his tips for guitarists ) along the edge, so it had to be something that would stay stuck over my entire finger ends.   Here's what didn't work - painters tape, athletic tape, scotch tape, electrical tape...

Paper tape

I was at my wits end until I remembered surgical paper tape (the 3M brand works well).
I discovered this miracle product when I needed something to protect skinned feet inside sweaty

carbon fiber speed-skating boots.  Stays on in the shower too. And turns out it will stay on finger ends for a guitar practice session, just about.  Can't say much for the tone but sacrifices have to be made...  A couple of weeks later I am rewarded with some white ends on my nails - yes- they are slowly growing back!

Hurrah! Growing at last

The problem now that there is a small amount of nail, the paper tape is wearing through at the nail and has to be replaced, sometimes more than once, during a practice session.  However as I can finally see progress, (I soon won't be able to type with my right hand again), I shall persevere - hopefully soon they will be long enough to switch to painters tape wrapped over the nail ends, and maybe, just maybe, I will have nails again by the time I resume my regular lessons in the fall,  5 long months after the plumbing incident. Would I use the stick-ons again?  In a heartbeat to save a performance, but they're coming right off afterwards!!!

What about products to increase nail strength?   I honestly can't say.  I spent a whole year painting onymyrrh on my cuticles and it was during the time I had good nails,  though I had good nails before and after too.  It's really hard to say given the long delay between using it and the treated nail reaching the business end.  In any case I knocked the bottle over and it's now off the market (though you can get straight myrrh from Amazon if you want to give it a try).  I do notice that taking biotin makes my nails grow faster.  I wasn't sure, so I stopped taking it, and my nails seemed almost to stop growing - so started taking it again and then had to start clipping non-guitar nails again, so that's a yes.  Nail hardening polish?  doesn't work for me either - seems to encourage chipping and breaking instead of bending and staying intact. So currently apart from the paper tape, I'm sticking with biotin and general hand and nail cream.  And I've given up cleaning sink drains for good!