Dear LPG,

I know that many men laugh when they hear a lady complain that she has broken a nail, even though it is sometimes a serious business, but what of us men?  Even though it is often much more obvious when you see a beautifully painted set of 10 with one that is significantly shorter, it can have repercussions when it happens to the other half of the population too.

I have no doubt that for many of the ladies among us, whatever their age, braking a nail is a serious cosmetic predicament because their nail varnish is so affected, particularly if they have spent lots of money and time in a nail bar (and I would like to point out that I am not belittling the importance of having or paying for the nails that you think you deserve) but these days a false nail can be a solution, and where they end and real ones begin is quite the conundrum for the male eye.  Even we men will have passed the rows of pre painted ones in the chemists and beauty shops from time to time. 

To an extent, and if my observation of my wife’s hands and utterings of that age old phrase, ‘Now look what’s happened, I have broken a nail!’, is anything to go by, many of the keratin fingertip-rips happen way above the bit where the nail is attached to the end of the finger, but when it happens to us men, perhaps less often but where the nails are usually much shorter to start with, it is on average a little more painful.

In my experience our ladies are more likely to catch a nail on a bit of material or the dish cloth when washing up while we men are the ones who will more readily bang it with a hammer or miss with a screwdriver; a very painful business as I was reminded again when doing a little fixing job in the relative darkness under the stairs recently.

When that happened to me, and after the initial ‘Ooowwww!’, I went to YouTube and learnt a little about what can be done, depending on the severity of the situation, and now that we are still close to the beginning of the New Year, when DIY is often predictably close to the top of the resolution list, I would like to pass on what I have learned.

So, ladies please don’t think that I am in anyway making light of any pain that a broken nail experience inflicts on the fairer sex, but I want those DIY enthusiasts to know that regardless of whether the experience has more of an effect on the nerves than the eyes, I feel your pain! 

HM, Greenwich

HM offer some broken nail fixing solutions for both ladies and gentleman…

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