A Clear Lacquer Judgment

Sometime after I turned 35-ish, my fingernails decided to go rogue. What were once normal, decent nails turned into weak, peeling, breaking facsimiles of their former selves. That means for the past decade, I've been throwing all manner of vitamins at them in the hope that one of those pills contains the magic solution — but so far, no luck.

However, determined to coax those suckers to at least grow past my fingertips without breaking, I've started using cuticle oil. Religiously. And what do you know? It seems to be helping! Sure, they're not exactly hand model-caliber (yet!!), but it's definitely a vast improvement.

I've been using something called CND Solar Oil, if you wanna know (and here's my Amazon link if you wanna snatch some up for yo'self). It's in an unassuming nail polish bottle with a white top. And that, folks, is where today's story begins.

I read somewhere that you should put on any sort of moisturizer while your skin is still damp for maximum effectiveness — and this morning, while I was washing my hands, I had the brilliant idea that maybe that would work with cuticle oil too. After all, cuticles are skin. So in lieu of towel drying, I just shook the excess water droplets into the air and hurried to the "nail drawer" in my nightstand where I keep all my crap, so I could get the cuticle oil on in time to seal in all that extra moisture. My nails were going to be so moisturized, y'all!

I yanked the drawer open, spotted the bottle right on top of the pile (which was organized at one time, but now looks like a raccoon has been digging through it), and wasted no time in slathering the nails of both hands with the cuticle oil. And I do mean slathering. There was no brushing the applicator gently against the neck of the bottle to remove the excess; I wanted the excess. The more product I heaped onto the brush, I figured, the more my cuticles would reap the benefits.  

Then I went to rub it in.

And my fingers were ... sticky.

In fact, they were sticking together.

And then the smell hit me, and it clicked. I had not grabbed the cuticle oil, as I had previously thought. 

I had grabbed a bottle of clear nail polish, whose quick-drying formula was now gluing my fingertips to one another, and to anything else I touched.

Remember this scene from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold's fingers are full of sap from the Christmas tree and his fingers get stuck in Ellen's hair, and to the lamp?

 

Yeah. It was like that. 

I realize that generally nail polish isn't that sticky, but apparently when you douse ten entire fingertips in it, that's a whole different story. I bolted into my bathroom and grabbed a cotton pad, which fused instantly to my fingers, leaving a wad of fuzz behind when I pulled it off. It took about twelve of those, plus an approximate half-gallon of nail polish remover (OK, I may be exaggerating on that one, but only slightly), to even get my fingers to the point where they didn't adhere to everything within a ten-foot radius.   

In my defense, when I made this critical (er, cuticle?) mistake, my bedroom light was off; it was daytime, but overcast, and I was a.) peering into a dark drawer and b.) in a hurry. To demonstrate, here is a photo of the CND Solar Oil on my nightstand ...

... and here is the NailTek strengthening polish in the same spot. (And here it is on Amazon.) 

See? They've got the same kind of white cap and the same clear-ish contents. 

PLUS I'M FORTY-FIVE AND MY EYES AREN'T WHAT THEY USED TO BE, OK?! Sheesh.

Sadly, it's not really the first time I've glued my fingers together, and I'm sure it won't be the last because these are the kinds of ridiculous things that happen to me. 

... But hey, at least it gave me something to blog about today.