How to whiten your nails

While I’ve been showing a lot of nail art and polishes on the blog this summer, I’ve also had a period of days when I wore no nail polish at all which is kind of unusual for being me at least since I’ve started my nail blog (2010!).

As you know I’m working on my nail care book, The Art of Nail Care – A Guide to healthy looking nails and it was during the most intensive photo shooting days that I skipped nail polish and had bare nails. That made me very aware of the color of my nails, of stains and stain removal.

Stains are hard to remove if you’ve had them for a long time but if you whiten your nails after every polish you wear you’ll gradually diminish the stains ending up with no stains at all after a while.

I’ve tried and described different techniques for stain removal for the book and I thought I would show you one of them here on the blog.

Stain removal with lemon juice

You will need:

• Lemon
• Cotton pads
• Aluminum foil

Here’s how to do it:

1. Soak the cotton pads in lemon juice. Make sure the cotton pads are really soaked in lemon juice. You might want to rub a slice of lemon on the cotton pads
2. Wrap your nails with cotton pads
3. Wrap the nails (together with the soaked cotton pads) in aluminum foil and wait for 10 – 15 minutes.
4. Remove the cotton pads and rinse with water

After using lemon juice on your nails you should apply hand cream on your nails and hands. Repeat the process the next day until you are happy with the result.