Are you a Nail Picker? 

Although we all claim not to be, when nobody is around most of us like to pick and scratch away at somewhere, it’s a guilty pleasure, and the fingernails are an easy - and tempting - place to choose. But if you are biting nails and scratching away at the cuticle of your fingernail - that tough, edge part of the bottom of the nail, you’re likely to be encouraging some unhealthy fingernail growing in the future. The cuticle is a protective seal for your nails, helping them grow correctly and preventing infection or excess water damage. Without a fully healthy cuticle, you’re just asking for brittle nails.

Remedy Environmental Causes

As mentioned earlier, it’s not always health reasons that destroy perfectly healthy nails. You could also have outside factors causing this. For example, your job may be encouraging poor practice in for your nails. If you’re a cleaner, for example, you may be regularly putting your hands in water and liquid, and while this every now and again isn’t bad form, across a number of years you may find that your nails aren’t getting the time to recover, therefore damaging your nails across the long-term. To stop this easily, wear rubber gloves while cleaning and make sure you dry your hands thoroughly once you have finished.

Moisturize Your Hands

If you don’t dry your hands properly after they’ve been in hot water, or if you spend a lot of time in the cold, your hands - and these cuticles, yet again! - can become very dry, and very dry means sore, tough and brittle. The damage mentioned above to the cuticle could be happening in this instance too. But moisturizers could help much more than that. Your nails have tiny, microscopic holes in them, and these holes could seep in water, nail polish or other nasties. This could cause you do get unhealthy, sore and chipped nails. If you moisturize before you do anything with your hands, this can help as a first line of protection against getting sore nails, and even nail fungus. 

Dehydration

Although we’ve mentioned a few times above how you can let too much water get to your fingers, you can also fall foul to having too little water yourself, fall dehydrated and this can affect your body in so many different ways, and that includes your fingernails. You need to be taking water into your body by drinking. If you don’t your skin becomes dry, you can get headaches and you’ll also end up with tough nails. Your body can’t keep your nails fresh and growing if you’re dehydrated, so all that happens is they stop growing and they become dry, brittle and old. For your overall health, it is a great idea to make sure you’re keeping hydrated with water and liquids.

In most instances, brittle nail prevention is fairly straightforward. As long as you keep hydrated, make sure you’re not having your hands in excessive amounts of water and you keep a healthy moisturizer/skin care routine for your hands, you can’t go far wrong.

If you’re particularly concerned about your fingernails, then always seek a doctor’s advice. You can always be sure to get the best treatment from there, but the above tips should keep you fairly healthy and brittle-nail free. Out of all of the advice above, the easiest to implement is to avoid chewing, biting or picking at those nail-end cuticles. The healthier they are, the better your nails will look and feel.