Sunday, July 11, 2010

Ideas for Beautiful Nails

Beautiful Nails - A Dream

Everyone likes clean, well-manicured and polished nails. In fact, strong and healthy nails serve as the perfect representative of the overall health and fitness of a person. Though most of the people are unaware of the fact, nails too need to be taken well care of.

Importance of Healthy Diet

Eating a healthy diet is as important for your nails as for the vital organs of your body. It is important to include certain vitamins, minerals and other nutrients in your daily diet to ensure that your nails remain healthy and look beautiful. At the same time, you need to make sure that you do not put undue stress on them, by using them as tools for picking, plucking, and so on. To get some more tips for healthy nails, go through the following lines.

Tips For Healthy & Beautiful Nails

1. If your nails are too brittle and dry, you should increase the consumption of food that items rich in vitamin A (such as apricots, broccoli, carrot and cheese) and calcium (such as milk, yoghurt, cheese and almonds).
2. Drink plenty of water and fresh fruit juices. It will help keep your body, and in turn your nails, well hydrated.
3. Carrot juice is rich in calcium and phosphorus and helps strengthen your nails. So, try to consume as much fresh carrot juice as is possible for you.
4. Do not file you nails just after you have had a shower or have washed your hands. This is because wet nails tend to break easily.
5. While filing your nails, make sure to go in one direction only. Do not move the filer in a back-and-forth motion, as it makes your nails brittle.
6. If you want to keep your nails strong and shiny, resort to nail buffing. It augments the blood supply to the nail, in turn stimulating its growth.
7. If you are suffering from the problem of hangnails, it is advisable to eat food rich in protein, vitamin C and folic acid.
8. Ensure that half of your diet is made up of fresh fruits and raw vegetables. This will supple your nails with the required vitamins, minerals and enzymes.
9. Supplementing your diet with spirulina and kelp will help make your nails strong and healthy.
10. Deficiency of vitamin B 12 can lead to dryness, rounded and curved ends and darkening of nails. So, make sure to include enough of the vitamin in your diet.

The Dangers of Nail Polish

Many women like to paint their fingernails with nail polish. According to the different colors of nail polish, different kinds of temperament are expressed. However, many women just like the beauty caused by nail polish and do not know the dangers of nail polish at all. In fact, nail polish is a kind of substance which is harmful to the human health.

Most of nail polish contains many toxic substances which threaten the human health. No matter how expensive the nail polish is, it is essential to pay attention to the toxins contained in it. After you paint the nails with nail polish, you should not fetch anything with your hands directly so as to avoid making the toxic materials touch the food. Some people even think that it is healthy to use nail polish when a layer of base oil has been painted on the nails. In fact, the nature of base oil is as same as that of nail polish. Base oil can never reduce the harms caused by nail polish at all.

Generally speaking, nail polish is composed of two kinds of substances. One is solid components like pigment and flash materials, and the other is liquid solvent components like acetone, ethyl acetate, phthalic acid esters, formaldehyde and so on. There are mainly two kinds of pigment, namely natural one and artificial one. Artificial pigment is rather popular. But most of artificial pigment is toxic and seriously threatens the human health. In fact, there are also many harmful materials contained in natural pigment. These harmful materials can be reduced to some degree through purification processing. All the components of liquid solvent materials can endanger the human health. For example, phthalic acid esters can affect the normal hormone balance, causing great damage to reproduction and leading to many other health problems. Benzene and formaldehyde are both carcinogenic substances.

In order to make nail polish dry rapidly, a large number of acetone and ethyl acetate which are easy to volatilize are added into nail polish. However, when these two kinds of components volatilize, the pungent smell can be produced, which can seriously pollute the indoor air. If people breathe such a kind of smell for a long time, serious harms can be produced to threaten the nervous system. In addition, if organic solvents are used to paint the fingernails once and again, the fingernails will become crisp and grey.