Healing Nail Damage: A Comprehensive Guide to Cuticle Care
Cuticle Care is the detailed restoration of the nail bed and the skin around it, which falls into disarray through daily living. Through Cuticle Care, we bring natural nails back to a clean slate, treating the various parts of the nail area to set up a long-lasting and healthful manicure. When you have painful nail damage that’s taken a toll on you psychologically, our Philadelphia nail salon’s solution begins with Cuticle Care.
Lots of things happen every day to our nails and fingers that routinely lead to short term and long term nail damage. Cuts, bumps, and bruises in the area distort and tear our skin barriers, compromising their integrity. The manicures we receive from nail salons that use regular polish and acrylic powders cause stress to our natural nails and the skin around the nail bed, causing nail damage like white spots on nails, paper thin nails, peeling nails, and discolored nails. Frequent exposure to heat, soap, and water through cooking, hand washing, dishwashing, and showers can lead to dry nail areas, peeling nail polish, and painful hangnails becoming an all-too-common occurrence.
Through direct communication with our clients and time-honed skills with nail tools, a nail technician that has received proper training restores your natural nails and the skin around them through Cuticle Care. The repetition of Cuticle Care at every manicure appointment with us directly results in the easing and eventual eradication of the physical pain and distracting thoughts that have plagued you since you started dealing with nail damage. As you will see, it’s the foundation of all manicure services at our nail salon in Old City - the heart from which everything flows. Cuticle Care is so integral to what we offer that we provide it as a standalone service, without gel nail polish - a rarity for nail salons in Philadelphia - and in the other three services that we provide with gel polish, Cuticle Care is built in from the start. Through Cuticle Care, we guide the rehabilitation of your natural nails from struggling with nail damage to becoming healthy, strong, and beautiful over time.
Table of Contents
What’s Included in Cuticle Care?
What to Expect from a Cuticle Care Appointment
The Difference: With and Without Cuticle Care
Why Cuticle Care?
Beautiful nails aren’t just about applying nail polish - at Atelier Anaiis, we believe that perfect nail beds and healthy cuticles go hand in hand. We’ve chosen to include Cuticle Care in every manicure service that we provide, making it the table-setter for our nail salon because it directly affects both longevity and the aesthetic beauty of the manicured nails of our clients. Combined with our staunch refusal to use E-files, Cuticle Care is the primary reason why our single color Structured Gel Manicure lasts three to four weeks without chipping or peeling, double the industry average of ten days to two weeks.
Cuticle Care allows us to gather critical information about your nails, integral to the planning of every client’s customized nail health plan. When you, as a new client, walk into our nail salon in Old City for the very first manicure appointment, we have no idea of the condition of your natural nails. We conduct an initial walk-through online through our intake form for first-time clients, which requires photos of your current natural nails, but until we have you in front of us, we can never fully assess the severity of the situation. You can imagine our nail technicians as airline pilots flying through a thunderstorm, only relying on gauges because visibility is so poor with the harsh rain making it impossible to see - “flying blind” is scary for pilots, and downright terrifying for the passengers, in this case you as the client. Cuticle Care is that ray of sunshine that cuts through the dark clouds, clearing our visibility. Because of our specialty in the preservation and restoration of your natural nails, the majority of our clients come to us with nail damage that they wish to heal. By fulfilling each step of Cuticle Care diligently and having a conversation with you about your previous manicure experiences, we’re able to come to an understanding about the current state of your nails and why the nail damage occurred in the first place. This provides our nail techs with crucial information to make real-time adjustments to the manicure so that the techniques best suit your nails, regardless of whether we apply or don’t apply gel nail polish. This gives us - both client and nail tech as a team - the optimal path towards strong, beautiful natural nails healed of nail damage.
Throughout the whole process of healing your natural nails with Atelier Anaiis, doing Cuticle Care at each appointment allows us to keep track of the progress that we’re making. Bringing your natural nails back to a clean slate every time you step foot in our Old City nail salon means that we can actually show the restoration and improvement happening step by step before your very own eyes, an encouragement like no other as it usually takes six months to three years for natural nails to heal from nail damage. Growing strong, healthy nails requires patience - being able to point to visible improvements that are happening appointment after appointment gives us feedback as a team that we’re on the right track. This process also allows us to gain valuable insight from you about how your nails felt throughout the weeks with the manicure and to make adjustments based on that feedback, if needed. At the end of the day, motivated clients who are excited by the progress that they’re making through each appointment heal their nails with the least amount of setbacks.
Last but certainly not least, Cuticle Care plays an important role in the aesthetic beauty of our manicures. In our previous blog post, The Ultimate Guide to French Nails, we discussed how important symmetry is to the nail design, one of the key factors separating good French nails from bad and ugly ones. Symmetrical French nails match the shape of the cuticles of each finger to the “free edge” or the tips of the nail. At Atelier Anaiis, this symmetry is achieved through Cuticle Care, when we carefully detach and remove cuticles and shape the eponychium so that they match the free edge perfectly.
What's Included in Cuticle Care
Cuticle Care is a collection of different techniques that never involve the use of E-files, including:
A detailed checking of the nail bed for signs of nail damage
Removing damaged skin around the nail bed
Safely detaching and removing cuticles
Carefully shaping the eponychium
Trimming loose skin from nail grooves
Trimming hangnails that can lead to painful infections
Cutting the free edge to the desired length using clippers
Filing the free edge to the desired nail shape
Buffing the nails in the direction of your nail growth
It’s important to note that the eponychium and the cuticle are often referred to as being one and the same, but this is not true. The eponychium consists of living skin, while the cuticles are dead skin cells that continue being pushed out from your nail matrix as your nails grow. Understanding this helps you see why a lot of products that are marketed for cuticle health is nonsensical, including the ever-popular cuticle oil - these products moisturize dead skin. Dead skin cells, no matter how much you moisturize them, will never come back and thus have to be removed safely. This is in contrast to the eponychium - which should never be removed - whose role is to prevent the nail matrix (the unseen origin of our nails) from exposure to bacteria.
What to Expect from a Cuticle Care Appointment
At our nail salon in Old City, Cuticle Care is provided both as a standalone service and as an integral part of our other manicure services that involve gel polish. All first time clients must have nail products from other nail salons removed before the first appointment with us. As the first part of our standard ninety minute single color Structured Gel Manicure appointment, Cuticle Care takes up 75% of the total appointment time, precisely because we refuse to use E-files. E-files and nail drills certainly cut down on appointment times at other nail salons, but the horrific damage and pain that they cause is one of the primary reasons why a nail salon like Atelier Anaiis was created.
The degree to which each part of Cuticle Care listed in the previous section is performed on every client is where the magic lies at Atelier Anaiis. Every one of our clients receives just the right amount of Care for their personal needs because as we repeat Cuticle Care appointment after appointment, we learn how the particular client responds to each treatment, helping us make adjustments. We realize that our Cuticle Care takes more time to do than most nail salons in Philadelphia take to do an entire manicure. Our clients, in return for their time invested, receive premium care - one that combines unmatched skill with undivided attention to your nails, leading to long lasting manicured nails.
At the beginning of your appointment, our nail technicians assess your natural nails, looking over the nail bed and cuticles in detail. We look for signs of nail damage, including yellowing, white spots, peeling, and bumps as we gain input from you about the nail damage. Depending on what we find, we adjust aspects of the later stages of the manicure, including the number of gel polish layers applied and the time spent inside the LED curing lamp. This is why we insist on first-time clients’ nails being free of any products from other salons - we can’t fully understand the state of your natural nails if you come in with nail polish from somewhere else that hides nail damage. Amongst nail technicians, we often say that no nail technician likes to fix someone else’s work. Just as the master contractor who built your house will be the only one with a complete understanding of why something was done a certain way, it’s often hard to understand the reasons that other nail salons execute their manicures in the way that they do. We’re sure that nail technicians who don’t work with our Philadelphia salon will have a hard time understanding why our manicures work for healing natural nails.
Once we’ve completed the assessment and had a conversation about the aesthetic you’re looking for during that day’s appointment, we begin to cut, trim, and file your nail tips to the desired length and shape. Then we follow the techniques we listed in the section above, What’s Included in Cuticle Care.
The Difference: With and Without Cuticle Care
At Atelier Anaiis we provide unparalleled nail care and nail art, two values that are integral to one another. In creating both single color nails and custom, hand drawn pieces of art on nails that require several hours to execute, we expect all of our manicures to last many weeks - robust enough to be able to handle the stress of our clients’ busy lives in Philadelphia. And in our nearly two decades of experience of providing nail services, without diligent Cuticle Care, beautiful and lasting nails are simply not possible.
Why is this? We can think of nail technicians as painters and each nail bed on clients’ hands as the canvas that they paint on. Regardless of what is being painted and the different techniques they may require, it’s clear that the end result will never be as good as it can be if the canvas itself is torn, uneven, and disheveled before being painted on. Cuticle Care gives us the pristine canvas all painters and their audiences appreciate. How many unclean and ripped canvases do you remember seeing on your last visit to your city’s art museum? We’d imagine not many. And if you did see one? It would be upsetting wouldn’t it?
A wonderfully clean nail bed achieved through Cuticle Care allows the brush with nail polish to travel smoothly. It’s similar to driving on a freshly paved road, as opposed to an uneven road full of potholes. When the foundation is done right, it leads to things that last: a perfect manicure for three to four weeks.
Tip from a nail professional: You can bet that a nail salon near you with nail techs who provide great Cuticle Care apply nail polish just as impeccably. Why? Cuticle Care is taxing for the nail tech, who must remain focused for the entire time to cut, trim, and shape just the right amount because the nail area is so sensitive. And once they’ve done all the hard work of Cuticle Care, the last thing they’ll want to do is ruin their work by applying polish messily.
Impact of Cuticle Care
The impact of Cuticle Care is felt throughout the whole process as we restore your natural nails and they continue to heal from existing nail damage. Appointment after appointment we will see the following:
Shedding of the portion of the nail bed with nail damage
Healing of open wounds from hangnails
Less hangnails
Less cuticle growth
Less dryness and cracking of cuticles
Manicures lasting longer without peeling, bubbling, or lifting
Saving money and time because manicures are lasting longer
Less nail breakage
Less reliance on nail enhancement techniques as natural nails grow stronger
Improved nail strength and less bending of the nails
Improved color of the natural nails
Improved confidence as natural nails feel and look better
Improved mood as irritation and pain from nail damages subside
Our clients in Philadelphia have experienced huge improvements to their lives. Through Cuticle Care, they’ve learned that what they had thought was an impossible task - not only healing their nails from nail damage, but getting beautiful colors and nail art in order to grow their nails stronger and protect them - turned out to be not impossible at all. What once weighed heavily on their minds - a challenge and obstacle to their personal and professional lives - has dissipated, and as a result, they’re liberated to fully focus on their goals.
Why Should You Care About Cuticle Care?
What makes a manicure worth it? At Atelier Anaiis, we believe that it’s longevity - how long your manicures last. We operate our business mindful at every turn of the resources that clients trade for our services - not just their hard-earned money, but their valuable time. We aren’t doing our job if the manicures aren’t lasting, and frankly, we wouldn’t have any regularly returning clients if that were the case. That’s why making sure that every manicure from us lasts longer than any other manicure you’ve experienced is a top priority for us.
Cuticle Care is the reason that we’re able to deliver on the longevity of your manicured nails. Our Structured Gel Manicure that’s done on your natural nails that lasts three to four weeks is only possible on natural nails that are actively healing from previous nail damage. The painstakingly detailed and time-consuming work of Cuticle Care is rewarded when, through our clients’ commitment to regular appointments, we are able to extend the days between appointments, a powerful and well-appreciated combination that saves our clients both money and time.
As a client, you deserve to go to nail salons that not only pay lip service to, but shows through their actions how much they care about your nails. We can empathize that nail damage is really frustrating to recover from, and the reality is that the longer you continue getting manicures that only focus on applying nail polish and skip Cuticle Care, the longer your pain will continue.
How to Know if You Need Cuticle Care
Through this post, we’ve communicated how we define Cuticle Care at Atelier Anaiis, showing you its individual parts and the reasons why we perform the service. But as you may have guessed, just because we define Cuticle Care in this way, doesn’t mean that other nail salons that offer Cuticle Care perform the service in the exact same way. Cuticle Care is an umbrella word, a general concept and we encourage you as the client to ask about how it’s performed. If the nail salon is competent, the nail technician will be able to describe in detail what, how, and why she is doing what she is doing to your nails.
With its fundamental relationship to nail health, Cuticle Care is just as important as getting nail polish on your nails. The way we see it, the fact that the word “manicure” in popular culture is more associated with nail polish than with the restoration of your nail areas is very flawed. While the degree to which every person needs Cuticle Care varies, anyone that cares for healthy nails free from nail damage and pain should look to Cuticle Care.
All clients at our Old City location have Cuticle Care done at every appointment. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: through Cuticle Care, we give ourselves the opportunity to learn the unique intricacies and characteristics of each clients’ nails and the more Cuticle Care we do appointment after appointment, the more optimal we can make your nail healing journey.
If you’re sick and tired of the damage you’ve endured to your natural nails, we hear you: contact us.
