Any health issues and treatments can be brutal to nail health.

Chemo is about killing cancer cells, so it’s going to kill a lot of other cells as well. Your nail matrix cannot possibly create good-quality cells. It takes nails four months to replace themselves, so you usually experience the results well after the treatments.

Since I’m not a doctor, I can’t make any diagnosis. But my assumption would be that once your health has improved, you will see that 4 months later.

I have never really worried about my hands and nails until I had chemotherapy for breast cancer last year. The chemo damaged my nails really badly, and they went really brown and became very brittle, flakey and peeling. Some of them even started lifting off the nail bed. I couldn’t afford to buy your cuticle oil because of the postage costs (I was broke after all the cancer treatment), but I did get some jojoba oil, and have been using this, along with other cuticle oils and nourishing treatments. The new growth on my nails is looking OK, but the brittle part of them is still the same and hasn’t completely grown out. Also, the nails have still not attached back onto the nail bed. Could you tell me if my nails will ever return to the way they were before my treatment? Have you had any feedback from people like me who have used your cuticle oil? We were given no advice before having chemo on how to look after our nails – just told that we should paint them with dark nail polish to keep the sun off them and to cover up any damage that was done. If I had known how to properly care for my nails, and the proper way to do a manicure, before my treatment, I’m sure the damage would have been nowhere near as bad as it has been. Each time I do my nails I file a little more of the dark, horrible fragile end off, and at the moment I have one nail that broke 2 days after I did my last manicure, and one nail held together with the “tea bag” method, which I have been nurturing for about a month now. It is so fragile that, if I didn’t put the tea bag patch on it across the tip, it would have broken right off at the hyponychium, and of course that would hurt, and could open it up to infection. I would appreciate any advice you can give me that may help to improve my chances of getting my nails back to normal, or even better if I can, because they’ve never been very good. I bit them for over 30 years, which of course didn’t help them at all. Once I’ve recovered from the cost of Christmas, I hope to be able to buy some of your Pure Oil, but I wish it was available in Australia somewhere. If you would like me to test and review it for you, I would be quite willing to put it on my blog, which I have started to try and help others to stop getting the severed damage I did from the chemotherapy. It has become a crusade for me, and I’m even trying to get nail care advice added to the pre-chemo advice given to cancer patients. Thanks for all the wonderful advice you have given us, and for taking the time to share it with us.

I use Sally Hansen cuticle remover about every two weeks. Make sure it does not touch your skin as much as possible, and you only apply it to the nail plate. You can use an orange wood stick to very, very gently scrape the skin off your nail plate. Do one hand at a time, and be sure to rinse it off as soon as you are done. Then move onto the second hand.

Professionals that don’t use correct names are insulting to their customers..They assume we aren’t intelligent enough or don’t care enough to know about our own bodies.

I did walk out of my local salon-where they can’t keep a tech more that a couple of months for some reason and when the owner asked why-I told him.

It may be close but I want a tech who respects my desires.

Thabks so much
Elle