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Beautify Your Hands With Acrylic Nails

Instant beauty for your fingertips

When you can't seem to grow your natural fingernails effectively, or you want instantly beautiful nails at your fingertips, you can always choose the acrylic nails or extensions option which is basically an artificially-created set of fingernails pasted onto a woman's real ones. Sure, they're artificial but they do look great and they can increase a woman's confidence in her appearance from the minute the technician finishes applying them.

Professional nail technicians abhor the word "fake" when referring to acrylic nails because they take pride in their work and don't like for it to be disparaged. Many women have acrylic nails applied for special occasions such as when they are attending a wedding or getting married themselves. Others do it so that they will stop biting their own nails. Once they are rid of the habit, they can consider going back to natural.

Acrylic nails are applied in salons, in a two-part system comprising a liquid called a monomer and a powder known as a polymer. As a well-informed customer, it's important to check with your salon that the liquid being used contains EMA (Ethyl Methacrylate) and not MMA (Methyl Methacrylate) which is cheaper but known to cause side effects such as mild to serious skin reactions and abnormalities in the growth of the natural nail beneath.

Application
After a consultation with your technician, you will be asked to wash your hands with mild soap and water. She will also sanitize her own hands after arranging all the required paraphernalia on the table. Cleansing the nail is vital and you will be given a soft brush and instructions to scrub around and under the nail plate. Hand washing renders skin up to 99% free of surface pathogens and all implements should be clean and sanitized before application begins. You will be asked about your lifestyle, the kinds of activities you regularly enjoy and the style and shape of the nails you would like. Acrylic nails are not usually applied too long because they can break and crack, thus requiring visits to the salon for repair work. While your new nails are being applied, you'll be given home care tips and you can decide when your maintenance appointments should be. As your natural nails continue to grow, your artificial ones will grow out with them so they will need to be maintained and "filled" back to the cuticle on a regular basis to keep them looking attractive.

The application process begins with a mini manicure, during which your natural nails will be trimmed and filed back and your cuticles conditioned with lotions and trimmed. Then the surface of your nails will be filed to create roughness, which will help the acrylic nails to better adhere to your own. The entire process takes from an hour to 90 minutes. During this time, you will notice some strong fumes from the actual acrylic. Try to avoid inhaling these vapors as they can be quite heady. You will emerge from the salon with perfect looking nails painted with a color polish of your choosing.

Acrylic nails tend to be somewhat high maintenance, which is a significant drawback unless you are prepared to commit to the maintenance sessions every two weeks. For this reason, having acrylic nails applied can be costly and time consuming but if you just love the look of them and really enjoy them, these considerations may be unimportant to you.