The Complete Beginner's Guide to Healthy Nail Care

Hey today's video is going to be on cuticle care and like my nail care stuff. If you watch my channel, you know I am not a professional and I've just been doing my nails pretty much since I was like 11–12, and I'm 21 now, so I've been doing this for almost 10 years. I honestly just do it for fun, and you guys started to see my nail looks and you guys asked for a video, and then the video blew up and now we're here.

I'm not a professional, so of course I'm not gonna do some things correctly, and in my past videos I've definitely not done cuticle care correctly. I've been researching like crazy on cuticle care and nail health and all that crap. There's a lot of things that I didn't know, and there's a lot of things that I want you guys to know.

I made this video to kind of explain that, to give you guys a little bit of knowledge about cuticles. I know the majority of people that watch my nail videos are also doing their nails at home, so I don't want to steer you guys in the wrong direction. So that's why I'm always learning how to do things correctly. I don't want you guys to mess up your nails.

These are my nails right now, and yes, there will be a tutorial on these, but I just want to show you guys how I keep my cuticles always looking nice and also keeping them healthy. So yeah, that is what this video is going to be. I hope you enjoy, and I love you so much.

The first thing I always do in my nail care is I trim my nails just to get it out of the way. This is only if it's needed. My nails are very uneven. They broke a bunch from moving boxes.

And I'm also going to clean under my nails to make sure there's no dirt or anything under them.

I only use a crystal nail file on my actual nails. I've noticed that it's much more gentle. I don't know if this makes sense, but sometimes my nails will kind of get rough on the free edge and kind of catch on fabrics and stuff, and this really helps my nails to stay super smooth.

And I try to go in only one direction, not back and forth, because it's a lot more gentle.

Now I'm going to be going in with cuticle remover. Cuticle remover is not necessary. You can totally do all of this on dry cuticles. I know a lot of nail technicians choose to go on dry cuticles. Honestly, it's just your preference. This helps me really get all of the cuticle off of my nail plate.

We're going to talk about cuticles a little bit. I have learned a lot about cuticles in the last few months, and a lot of stuff in my nail videos I'm actually talking about incorrectly. As you know, I am not a professional. I am always learning new things from you guys and just doing my own research. I recently got professional nail textbooks that are used in cosmetology school. I'm always learning new stuff.

So what I'm pointing to right now is what a lot of people think the cuticle is. This is actually not the cuticle, and it's called the eponychium. Literally my whole entire life I thought this was the cuticle, and I know many people watching this completely think this is the cuticle as well.

Doing research, you don't have to trim this off. You can, but honestly if you're doing DIY at home and you're not a professional nail technician, I do not recommend you trim this with nail scissors or nippers. Obviously you're going to do what you're going to do, but I'm not going to tell you to because it can lead to infection.

This actually helps block infection from happening, and once you cut it off it's just opening the door for more infection and all that.

So now we're going to actually talk about the cuticle. The cuticle is actually on your nail plate. The reason why we want to get rid of the cuticle and scrape it off is because with whatever nail stuff you're doing, if it's just gel or if you're doing acrylics or gel extensions, anything, cuticle gets in the way and it can make your nails lift and make them not last as long.

So that's why cuticle care and prep and stuff is so important before you do your nails.

To get rid of the cuticle, I apply my cuticle remover on my nails in that area. I let it sit for about 15 seconds to kind of get it working.

This is personally my favorite cuticle pusher. There are so, so many different types of cuticle pushers. If you've never done cuticle care before and you're a beginner, I would suggest using the wood or rubber ones. I'll have them linked down below.

If you're not super experienced, these can actually damage your nails, so you want to make sure you're doing it correctly. You want to have your cuticle pusher as flat as possible.

I have very overgrown eponychium. I need to push that back because it bothers me. It gets in the way of my nail look. You don't want to scrape or anything like that. You just want to carefully push it back slowly and slowly. You don't want to be too rough because you don't want to damage your cuticles.

It might take a little while because this skin is super thick and tough, and everyone's cuticles are different. Some people might have super thin eponychium and some people might have super thick, so depending on the person it might take longer.

On the other side of my cuticle pusher I have this little scraper. Most have some sort of scraper. A lot of them look different, but this is personally my favorite.

I take it and I scrape along my nail plate where the overgrown cuticle is. This really, really gets the cuticle off of the nail plate, and I just do that until there seems to not be cuticle there anymore.

After I'm done pushing back my cuticles, I always wipe off the cuticle remover. After I'm done with this, I will actually go wash my hands because you don't really want the cuticle remover to be sitting on your fingers because it's just not good for your skin to have it on that long.

So after that you're definitely going to have lifted cuticle in some areas, and for me, since my eponychium was so overgrown, I'm gonna have a little flap of skin there.

Right now I'm trying to be super gentle with my cuticles, so I am not going to be trimming my eponychium flap off. If you have overgrown eponychium, you push back your cuticles and you still have that flap, what you want to do is just take your cuticle pusher back and push that eponychium flap back every day, and it will slowly recede and kind of figure out that it's not supposed to be all the way overgrown.

That's something you can do if you don't want to trim them off but you also don't want that big giant flap there all the time.

To remove the bigger pieces of cuticle and stuff, I'm going to be taking my cuticle nippers and I'm just going to be gently taking off those pieces.

You want to be very careful with cuticle nippers if you are going to be using them. I have had my fair share of cutting my cuticles. It's honestly the only way you learn how to do it is doing it on yourself. Just be careful.

So after that I'm going to be going in with a hand cream. I get very dry hands because I wash my hands a lot and I'm constantly doing things to my fingers with doing nails and stuff.

This hand cream is my absolute favorite. It's so moisturizing. It seems a little bit greasy at first, but then it soaks in in about five minutes and your hands are just moisturized.

I'm now going to be taking some cuticle cream. This is such a throwback. I used to use this like 10 years ago and it's still so amazing.

Then I'm going to be putting on cuticle oil. This is my DIY cuticle oil that I'm going to be doing a video on.

The reason why we're putting all of this stuff on our nails is to keep our nails super moisturized. Dry nails are brittle nails, and brittle nails, of course, are nails that are going to break.

I also put cuticle oil under my nails because it gets very, very dry under there.

I will probably do this every one to two weeks depending on how my cuticles are looking and how often I do my nails.