When going to get your nails done, the last thing on your mind is the possibility of losing your entire thumb. Unfortunately, that almost happened to Lowri-Anne Wilson after she went to a salon in Wales and contracted a serious infection. Now she's warning others about her experience.
Just a few days after getting acrylic nails at her local nail salon, Wilson noticed something wrong with her thumbnail.
"I had my nails done in a salon and two days later there was a pulsing pain in my thumb on my left hand," she told Metro.
It began to swell, so she went to the hospital, and the doctors told her it was an infection and abscess on her thumb — and that she'd have to return to the salon to get the nail removed.
But when the salon refused to take it off, and she ended up needing surgery in the hospital to have her thumbnail removed.
If doctors didn't catch the infection in time, it would have spread to her bone and she probably would have lost her entire thumb.
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Although she's on antibiotics now, the mother of four said that the pain is "worse than childbirth."
"This is the first lot of surgery that I will be going through, there will be others to follow when the nail starts growing back," she said. It may take months for her thumb to fully heal, and her nail may never grow back, she said the doctors told her.
"You sometimes hear stories about acrylic nails going wrong but you never expect it to happen to you," she continued.
For the most part, acrylics are safe, as long as the salon you're going to is fully licensed and up-to-standard.
"I can't stress enough how important it is not to go to non standard salons," Annie Collins, a nail expert in the United Kingdom, told Metro. "A lot of these places don't sanitize their tools properly and the equipment they use are cheap and nasty. I have seen firsthand what these salons can do to women's nails."
According to US News & World Report, 75 percent of nail salons in the United States don't properly follow state protocol for disinfection and sterilization. So since manicures and pedicures often cause microtraumas to the skin, an unclean nail tool can transfer a bacterial or fungal infection.
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It's probably worth it to make sure that your local salon is up to par when it comes to sanitizing their foot baths and tools, and they shouldn't be using a credo blade, which looks like a vegetable peeler and is more inclined to cut your skin. On that note, maybe just bring along your own tools, since having banging nails is not worth losing a finger.
