In which there’s a post of no interest to anyone who does not wear acrylic nails.

Sunday I went to my favorite nail salon, LT Nails, over on Issacs street, for a fill.

“A fill” is the procedure in which, after your nails have been growing out for two or three weeks, they “fill” the part closest to the cuticle with new acrylic. Accomplishing this requires polish remover, a Dremel, two kinds of filing and buffering devices, an anti-fungal, and new acrylic, which is applied with a paint brush.

The guy who did my nails observed a discoloration about the size of the tip of a ball point pen on my left thumbnail. This is interesting, because my acrylic nails are fairly discolored due to the fact that I’ve had them on for quite awhile and they age; even though you get fresh acrylic every couple of weeks, the stuff on the tips is always many weeks old, and becomes stained by contact with food and heat. This tiny little dot of discoloration concerned him enough that he just went right ahead and removed the entire acrylic overcoat from my nail, and then tried for a while to buff the discoloration off my very thin natural nail.

It wouldn’t buff out.

So he took a pair of professional nail cutters — the ones that look like sharp, bladed pliers — and removed about 20% of my thumbnail. The part he removed started about 1/3 of the way across the nail’s width at the non-cuticle end, and tapered down across the nail bed to the cuticle. It didn’t even hurt, weirdly enough, but there was my naked, nailless nail bed out in the open. It felt weird, because those nerves aren’t used to being exposed to air.

When he was done, the discoloration was gone. I’d had a fungal infestation under the acrylic, insinuated in and blooming between the cells of my nail.

How gross is that?!

Then he painted the nailless part of the nail bed with superglue, and covered the entire nail surface with fresh acrylic, building an acrylic-only portion where there was no nail to support it.

It was way cool. The shit they can do with space-age polymers these days!

His diligence also saved me, most likely, from losing my entire thumbnail to a fungus. Yay!