How we gave up on gel polish and what was the result: editorial test

Over the past year, trends have changed almost every week. But despite coquettecore, balletcore, barbiecore and other words ending in -core, one trend remains firmly established in social media hashtags and in the minds of the modern generation: the trend towards naturalness. Adherents of the clean girl aesthetic focus on naturalness with health concerns, preferring healthy minimalism and “cleanliness” in clothing, daily life and make-up, instead of catchy, bright maximalism that blocks the visual space. According to statistics from the Global Wellness Institute, 60% of Zoomers believe the way we look after our health will be the biggest permanent change. And so, the trend towards naturalness first brought into fashion the minimum of cosmetics on the face, and now it has also reached the nails.

Thus, a new term was added to the Internet dictionary – “leatherization”. The concept describes expanding the field of self-care. In simple terms, you now need to pay attention not only to the skin of your face and body, but also to your nails. And one can already be happy and count the money saved on manicure, even if there is no significant “but”: many girls, including The Fashion Vibes editors, have already forgotten what their nail plates look like without sparkles, scrubs and design. But as we like to say, you can’t improve if you don’t get over yourself, so we’re launching our experiment. This time we decided to see how our nails changed after giving up gel nail polish. But failure alone is not enough; It is important to keep your nails healthy. For two weeks, three of our editors, based on personal experience, tested three popular methods of caring for the nail plate after removing the gel: complete disregard for care, homemade masks from the Internet and MERZ Spezial dragees. Read the results in our material.

I started doing veneered manicures in the ninth grade, and all of my friends suddenly started studying to become masters and invited me to join them as a model. From then on, I became addicted to gel polish and wore it on and off for seven years. As a beauty editor, I constantly follow trends in the beauty industry, and lately I have increasingly noticed that many stars are abandoning coated manicures, and gel polish is being replaced by “naked” nails. Since I couldn’t remember exactly what my “bare” nails looked like, I decided to forego the coating. At least for experimental purposes. Day X came and I went to the beauty salon to remove the gel polish. Everything happened quickly – after 40 minutes, for the first time in a long time, I saw my nails without coating again. They were very thin and weak.

Even though they were cut short, for the first week it was painful for me to even touch them, let alone peek at them (which I do regularly). To say they were broken would be an understatement. I even started carrying a nail file with me because this often happened at the most inopportune moments. A strengthening varnish would have helped here, but I could not use it (these were the conditions of the experiment). Because of this I suffered for about a month and was unable to open things that I could easily open with strong nails. But after two months, I started to see progress; Now my nails are denser and don’t break as often.

In late autumn, for the first time in several years, I refused to seal my nails and, after removing the gel, extensions and hardware manicure, went home with only medicated varnish. There is no long or dramatic story behind this decision; Actually, the reason is simple and lies in the fact that you do not even have a few hours to visit the salon. Just for stats: I managed to get my last manicure done right before my birthday on September 20th, and with December fever of all kinds of deadlines just around the corner, I don’t see any extra hours in my schedule. But this became an excellent reason to start repairing my nails after constantly changing the coating, so almost every evening at home I was accompanied by bath experiments from salt to honey. As a long-time fan of many home treatments for hair, skin and nail care in general, I was sure that even simple and quick baths would not let me down, and I was not mistaken.

And after trying all kinds of recipes, my favorite was the honey milk bath (mix a glass of warm milk, three tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of salt and the juice of half a lemon) – it stimulates growth, adds shine, whitens, repairs and strengthens the nail plate. On the Internet they advise to keep your hands in the bath for 30 minutes, but I did not always have such time, so sometimes I shortened the procedure by half, or even three times, but still noticed a visible result. After a week of experimentation, nails became less brittle, and the skin around them became more moisturized and nourished. It’s even a pity that in December, before all the holidays, you have to hide this beauty under a layer of gel (no).

A few months ago I had to give up gel polish. It turned out that I got a burn from a lamp in the cabin. As a result, roughly speaking, almost nothing remained of my nails: some nails broke off at the root, and some of the master had to “clean up” due to onycholysis. And so I walk around with the now fashionable “naked” nails. Now I just do a classic manicure without coating, moisturize my cuticles and take Merz vitamins. I’m no longer ashamed of my nails like I was a few months ago.

A dietary supplement is NOT A MEDICINE.

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Merz-2211624, from 29.11.2023