Don’t be bummed if your beauty budget can’t cover pretty French nails and twinkle toes anymore WAH

This is a continuation of my too broke to afford manicure and pedicures article. The primary reason I had to quit going to the nail salon was that I couldn’t afford the appointment costs, tipping and upkeep expense for the acrylic French tip nails and brightly nail polished and gem accented toes that I loved. I do miss having perfect nails, especially the clean cut perfect polished look of short and sweet length French tipped nails. But I noticed some ancillary benefits from exiting the nail salon scene that I will go into in this beauty blog post. Follow the manis & pedis tag at the bottom of this blog post to read all of my articles and beauty tips about manicures and pedicures for women over forty.

You don’t have to scramble to get there or wait & wait for your appt or favorite manicurist anymore

When you have plenty of free time on your hands, its really not a problem to sit and wait for a manicurist to become available. You can relax and enjoy a magazine or chat with the ladies drying their nails. When I was younger, I found the appointments relaxing and didn’t mind the wait. When I got older and over forty particularly, the wait for my appointment become rather torturous. For one thing, now I had four children. So if I was in nail salon at all, I pretty much had a gun in my head to get in and out of there as fast as humanly possible. Or, I had an infant or toddler with me at the appointment. If it was a good day, they would sleep or play games. On a bad day, they would disrupt the relaxing environment of the nail shop.

Even if I was meticulous about making advanced appointments, they never came exactly on time. If I was late a walk-in would get in front of me. I might have to wait for my feet to be done by a different lady (which translates into two tips for the service instead of one). The appointments were just taking up too much time. The last thing I wanted to be doing was sitting in a nail shop waiting for a few precious hours on a Saturday while someone was watching the kids for me. It just wasn’t working out. The nail salon appointments and the entire manicure/pedicure process was too time consuming. When you free yourself of manicure and pedicure appointments is when you realize how much time and money it was involving. Yes I miss the nice look of professional nails, but I don’t miss the time commitment one bit. I’m actually more relaxed not having to go, and not having to deal with it.

You can’t wreck your nails or feet rushing home since you never got them done in the first place

Because I was always in a rush to leave, I would sometimes nick a nail or create a polish smudge by touching my car keys to one of my nails or having to dig for a cell phone or something out of my purse before my nail polish was totally dry and set. I always inadvertendly wreck a toe or a few toes by forgetting flip flips and having to smash my feet back into shoes too soon after a pedicure. Even if I used a fan or one of the nail drying machines, I would mess up. Being in a rush to get in, get out, finish and get onward where I was going was stressing me out and taking the relaxation component out of the manicure and pedicure appointments. The ladies would help me get my money out without wrecking my nails (no wonder) but I would still wreck them between leaving and starting my car! When you really didn’t have the liquid cash available for the appointment, then wreck one or more nails on top of having paid, you aren’t a happy camper.

No more broken nail repair or jewel fell off emergency appointments

Stretching out nail polish appointments, combined with being a parent, forced me to progressively get shorter and shorter nails just so that they would not break. Especially during the tail end of time before getting acrylics filled, your nails are extremely likely to break. Anything I did around my house or yard was a potential nail breaker. Then if I didn’t have time to go in and fix the nail, I was walking about with scraggle nails. Because I got so busy I probably had scraggly nails desperately needing to be filled just as often as perfectly coifed nails ready to be showed off.

Men love women with polished nails. First off all, nails especially acrylics are great for back scratching and feel good on the skin. Second, men learn to judge a woman by her grooming and appearance. I have read and heard men often say that a woman with nice hairs, nails and toes is a women they like because it is evident to them that they take care of themselves. It shows the woman is interested in her upkeep and appearance and men take notice and men like it. Men like women in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition too, and trust me, they aren’t paying attention to nail polish colors!

So, yes it’s more attractive to men when women have nice hair, nails and toes. But if you’re running around with a ragged nail or acrylic fill gaps and broken hang nails, that looks disheveled too. Unless you have the time to maintain them properly, nail salon nails can look pretty sloppy! At that point, a simple home polish job in a light neutral color starts to look like a reasonable alternative. Just because you are not going to the salon does not mean you can’t keep you nails looking clean and neat at the least.

No more paper thin nails because of unsanitary acrylic nails anymore

I never really realized how disgusting and not sanitary those nail shops are until I started not going as often. Then, when I did show up, I was repulsed. All the gross cups with metal nail tools in them. OK yes maybe those fluids were de-sanitizers but it wasn’t like the tools were getting scrubbed clean between customers. The nail cutting, cleaning and cuticle trimming tools were plopped into the sanitizer cup and then yanked right back out for the next customer. Gross! Didn’t 60 minutes or 48 hours do a expose on this at one point in time? Even in the cleanest best nail salons they probably have to do some serious work to keep a fully steralized environment. In recent years they started keeping a plastic baggie for each customer and giving them their own nail buff block, but still, the shops are gross in terms of cleaning! Even the top nail shops are pretty dirty in my opinion.

Don’t even get me started into the foot tubs. When you get older you tend to become pickier and grumpy to say the least. They never seems to get the water hot enough in the foot water tub for me. I would watch them finish with one lady, run to the back, and quickly fill the foot tub up with water for me. Nobody scrubbed or cleaned the tub. Yucky! Then, if the tub had barely warm water I would have to send it back. I wanted my feet to boil in the foot spa because at least if the water was scalding hot it might have cleaned the germs from the lady before me.

Acrylic nails can really get unsanitary. Believe it or not, you can get a fungus nail from acrylics and/or dirty salon environments. While they look good, when you have acrylic nails year after year, your nail beds actually get pretty paper thin and delicate. Sometime when I had acrylics replaced or filled I was in real throbbing nail pain! My fingers would throb and I would feel like I had real sore hands. It was painful. When you first get rid of acrylics you will notice that your fingers are in total pain and like raw exposed nerves. The process of constantly covering them with acrylic makes them sensitive and paper thin underneath. I’ve heard some women say to me that they get acrylics because they have naturally thin nails but in reality acrylics can make your nails even more sensitive and may not be a fix for the problem.

I also noticed a yellowing color to the nails from having been smothered by acrylic for so long. Not only that, some women develop little fungus problems on their nails from having an acrylic nail job done where some dirt or germs got left underneath. Overall, acrylic nails can be rather unsanitary. Even in you have naturally thin nails, you might survive by keeping them short and rounded with a strengthening clear coat on them rather than acrylic material. I will just say that while acrylics look great when just done, they can be problematic when you’ve had them for years. Most women that quit acrylics think along the same lines as me, good riddance.

My conclusion is that nothing can beat a professional manicure and pedicure, but quitting the nail salon saves time and money!

Well I hope this list meant to cheer you up because you’re too budget constrained to afford manicures and pedicures anymore cheers you up. Just remember that many of the models in magazines skip the long nails and go for the short natural look. The models in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition don’t have long red claw nails – they are natural beauties. You can be a natural beauty too now. You are in good company! When your finances change you can always go back to getting regular finger and toe nail appointments again. If you have a special occasion like a wedding, reunion, birthday party or important family function or holiday vacation in the sun, you can always make an exception and splurge. So don’t be depressed and know that you are saving money on beauty expenses that most women in this world don’t even think about (they have real problems).

If you are forced to give up your manicures, pedicures and artificial nails just know that you can still make your nails look reasonably good for pennies. You can skip the polish altogether and keep them clean, short and buffed. Or, you can get inexpensive polish and remover at the discount store, put your reading glasses on and practice doing it yourself. If you suck that bad, stick to light, pale or clear natural toned nail polish colors to help disguise your beauty ineptitude.