Rock Climbing with a Gel Manicure

I finally got one of those "gel" manicures everyone has tried to sell me on for years. Will it pass the ultimate chip test, rock-climbing?

Normally I don't get my nails done, for a couple of reasons. 

One, I'm cheap and I'd rather do it myself at home if I'm going to have painted nails at all. 

Two, I tend to engage in a lot of work and leisure activities that involve banging and scraping my hands around, and washing them a lot, and it just seems like why bother? 

I've worked in food service, in a warehouse, with animals, with soil...and for the past couple of years my main form of exercise and recreation has been indoor rock-climbing, where your fingertips have intimate contact with all shapes of fake rocks. 

Plus, I'm not the clumsiest bulb in the drawer, but I'm not the smoothest one either. Even if I manage to sit still long enough to let my nails dry in the first place, usually I soon decide I need to do something important like jam my nail into a keychain ring to get a key on or off, or pick up a cardboard box that scrapes off layers of polish along with a bit of skin, or dig with my hands in some sand or something like that. 

I figure I'm just not ladylike enough to have ladylike nails, and I resign myself to the fact that if I paint my nails I might get a few minutes (if I'm lucky, a whole evening!) of ladylike finger flowers, and then I will be dealing with a week or several where it looks like I just slammed all my fingers in doors at various different angles. That is the price for liking the way my nails look for the time it takes to have one drink. (ooh, not if I opened it myself though...)

Reason one for not usually getting my nails done is definitely related to reason two, because if a manicure lasted more than fourteen seconds without me finding a way to damage it, I would probably be more willing to pay somebody else to do one for me.

Whenever I visit my sister, I do end up getting my nails done, because it is one of her things and there is an affordable place right by her house. This summer I spent a long time, well the whole summer, visiting her, and when we got our nails done I was like "whatever, those gels seem expensive and dumb, no thanks." But then I saw how hers held up over the next few weeks, and I started to wonder...While I chipped and dented my nail polish about seven times in the first few hours (by daring such unladylike activities as unbuttoning my jeans to pee, getting my keys out to open the door, untying my shoes, etcetera), hers were still intact after 24 hours, and then several days, heck, a week! This was not familiar to me. 

Later in the summer I was trying on some strappy heels I wanted to wear to a friend's wedding and realized that my pedicure was maybe two months old and looked like I had slammed doors onto only parts of a few toenails...I thought maybe I'd spring for another mani-pedi before leaving for the wedding. 

After much deliberation, back-and-forth with the nail technician, face scrunching, and personal exploration of my soul and my full plans for the weekend (wedding today, rock-climbing with a friend tomorrow) I finally made the courageous decision to try this not-even-that-new-fangled "gel" everyone was selling. Per my sister's example, gel on the hands, regs on the feet. 

I was wearing a charcoal-grey dress so I was trying to accessorize with color, and I had brought both the shoes and the earrings I was planning to wear into the salon, so I could match them to my nails.

Here is me looking all freshly painted:

And here are the accessories I was matching my nails to:

This bit about my outfit styling choice is neither here nor there, kind of, but perhaps at this point you are starting to wonder if I am perhaps a bit more femmie than I had originally made myself out to be. Do you see how my full range of identity expression has been oppressed by poor nail paint technology???? 

On the real though, I don't always like to dress up, but when it's dress-up time, well, sure, I may just be the sort of person to want my accessories to match my nails and whatnot. 

I feel I should mention that as I was sitting in a massage chair with my feet in a mini jacuzzi I thought how there was almost no chance in hell that the actual bride at this wedding would be getting her nails professionally manicured today. This was confirmed later, when I gestured toward my newlywed friend's purple nails and asked if she had them done, and she replied "are you kidding? I just painted them like five minutes before the wedding!" I love my friends.

Anywho, wedding was great, nobody but me probably noticed or gave a flying fuzz about my nails, meanwhile I felt very fancy and femme. 

The next day, in a true triumph, I was not too hungover to make my climbing date with a friend, and I took this "immediately before" photo inside the gym, in case this was the last I saw of my semi-perfect nails. The manicurist had cut my nails short per my request, but not nearly as short as I would have cut them myself for climbing. 

We worked on several boulder problems for a while until we were tired and hungry, and here is my "immediately after" pic, still covered in chalk. For you non-climbers out there, people tend to use white chalk on their hands when climbing, like gymnasts do on the bars. For the climbers, V0-V3, if you were wondering. 

immediately after climbing

I was amazed! No chips, not even one! And no deep scrape lines down the nail as I have sometimes incurred climbing. They looked about the same!

later that night, chalk washed off

After this I climbed several more times over the next couple of weeks, and the polish pretty much held up. I also moved through the world using objects, opening and closing things, and generally living a normal life, and the polish did not chip. At one point when they started to grow out I broke a nail, and eventually I started picking at the edges where it was growing out, and thus began the gradual breakdown. But all in all I was very impressed! What's more, everyone had told me that one of the downsides to gel was that normal nail polish remover can not remove it, so you have to go back into the salon and have them bandsaw it off or whatever, but the truth is I eventually just picked it all off...with my nails. 

broken ring finger nail, and polish that is begging to be picked at...

Trigger warning if you don't like peely things!!!

kinda really satisfying

The first time I ever got stitches (I broke a glass on my finger), I took one of them out myself when it healed, partly by accident. When I went in to get the rest of my stitches removed by the professionals, I didn't think they did all that much that I couldn't have done myself, and I thought next time I had something like that I would just take the stitches out myself. Point being, I felt I could get this impenetrable nail-polish off using my very own natural tools, and I was right.

a few weeks after, having slowly peeled, trimmed, and filed...still a couple more left to peel

Anyway, in conclusion, gel nails are pretty hardcore, and worth the extra few bucks, even for people who are active with their fingertips! 

Also:

This is genius, I will def do this if I ever get gels done again!

http://www.sydnestyle.com/2012/10/ask-sydne-how-to-make-a-gel-manicure-last/

I remembered that another reason I hadn't wanted to try gels was that the word "gel" sounds like "gelatin" to me, and as a vegan I avoid products made from gelatin. I didn't actually do the research until a quick search just now, but it seems that "gel" nails fall into the category of things that are far too unnatural to contain any animal products, and according to these forum posters, they also tend not to be tested on animals. 

http://forum.theppk.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=25379

It seems all the medical professionals agree that gels, and nail polish in general, should be used in moderation. So I guess it's good I happen to be back to bare nails for awhile!

http://www.webmd.com/beauty/nails/gel-manicure-safety