This week's wisdom is my tried-and-true advice for how to stop biting your nails, based on my own experience as a life-long nail-biter who was recently reformed.
In order to stop biting your nails, you're going to need to invest in four essential tools:
Sturdy nail clippers
Cuticle cream (Burt's Bees is my favorite - see how worn it is from so much use?)
Clear nail polish
A high-quality nail file
The trick is to make your nails look nice all the time. Then you won't be tempted to bite them. Instead, when you want to pick at them, you can file them or put cuticle cream on them instead. This requires constant vigilance and carrying the nail file and cuticle cream around with you everywhere, at least at first. But believe me, if I can do it, so can you!
Second of all, keep them short. When my nails start to get longer than I'm comfortable with, I get antsy and want to bite them. I used to have this idea in my head that nails have to be long to look nice. But that's just not true! They can be short as long as they're unbitten and nicely groomed.
You should also make sure to keep clear nail polish on hand. Why? Because clear nail polish is the best-kept secret of busy, well-put-together women. It makes nails look classy and polished (literally), you can paint quickly and messily and it'll still look fine, and chips will be invisible! Keeping your nails painted clear is an easy way to make them look awesome.
Or you can do what I did: give up biting your nails for Lent. That's what motivated me to develop this system, since I didn't want to resort to using those bad-tasting nail polishes. For me, this approach worked like a charm.
Here's how my nails looked after a few weeks of this treatment:
You might not be impressed by this picture, but it's a huge improvement compared to they looked before! Now they're short, but polished, even and tidy. They could use a little more cuticle cream (see the dryness around the nail bed?) but other than that they're fine.
Do you have any secret tips or tricks for kicking the nail-biting habit?
When I was little I was terrible with biting my nails. My parents enacted the gold star point system. Every day I didn't bite I got a gold star. Sometimes I wonder what it was exactly that was my reward for enough gold stars. I really don't remember getting one. Maybe that means I never met my goals? I seem not to have the habit today, though!
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