Beauty Confessionals: I wore fake nails for two years straight and will regret it forever

We’ve all made beauty mistakes—from the chunky blonde streaks of our youth, to self-tanner blunders, we firmly believe that missteps are how we learn what works for us and what doesn’t. In our new series, Beauty Confessionals, our editors are admitting to some of their biggest beauty regrets. We do this because we care and we want you to learn from our mistakes (and because we want to hear your beauty confessionals, for we are all children of the internet and enjoy embarrassing ourselves online). Since this series was my cruel idea (am I cyber-bullying my coworkers?) I’ll kick things off.

One of my biggest beauty regrets is my total lack of regard when it comes to maintaining fake nails. In my lifelong quest to become Rihanna, three years ago I adopted her signature nail look—long, bright, and obviously fake. My shape of choice was pointy stiletto nails, partly because I was never brave enough for the square tips she’s been sporting as of late. Regardless, my motto was “the longer, the better” which is all fine and well, until you take into consideration the fact that I went two full years of getting bi-weekly fills and never giving my nails a chance to breathe. It’s no secret that fake tips aren’t great for the health of your real nails, but if you get them removed for a week every two months or so, it’s possible to maintain tips that are in pretty good shape.

I, of course, didn’t do that and only really removed them once every three months for, oh I don’t know, a minute or two while my nail technician prepped my new set. As a result, once I realized that stiletto nails, while nice to look at, did not in fact turn me into Queen Rih, I finally got rid of them for good and was left with brittle, paper-thin tips that took a year to nurse back to health. When I say brittle, I mean that the skin underneath them was constantly sore, and tying shoelaces would break my nails in half—literally down the middle. (That’s as painful as it sounds, by the way.)

So how did I nurse them back to health? Weekly olive oil treatments and conditioning products like Julep‘s Oxygen Nail Treatment ($22, sephora.com). The formula is made with advanced oxygen technology that hydrates nails while providing a pretty tint (to cover up temporary discolouration and scratches) that still allows nails to breathe. For the record, my hands have been fake nail-free since last summer, and they’ve gotten strong enough to grow and shape into natural stiletto nails. Sometimes even the grossest of stories has a happy ending.

Finally, I present you with a little throwback of Rihanna experiencing some nail issues of her own, because why not?

Tell us your biggest beauty blunders in the comments below or tweet us, and let our editors help you out!

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