The Detox Manicure: The Best Thing You'll Ever Do For Your Nails

We sent our Beauty Features Editor to try out the Japanese Manicure. And the results were incredible. If you're the type of girl who constantly switches from one polish to the next, you have to read this...

I love the high shine and zero-smudge quality of gel polishes but hate the guilt I feel at the fragile state they reduce my nails to. I'm clued up on nail oils and take endless supplements to make my nails strong but still the constant lacquering takes its inevitable toll. That's when I heard about the Japanese Manicure at Nailberry – an ancient Japanese technique of buffing nutrients deep into the nail bed to achieve nails so brimming with health, they shine on their own without the need for a drop of polish.

Big claims. So convinced that nothing could make me pack away the lacquer for more than a few days, I went along to trial it out.

The treatment:

As I relaxed deep in an armchair, my nails were buffed all over, ready for the miracle paste. Then the main event, a superfood complex of beeswax, lanolin, glycerin, squalane, paraffin and natural silicon earth was worked into each nail and polished vigorously in one by one. The whole process was then repeated three times until my nails were glowing and brilliant.

The results:

I walked out of the salon, gobsmacked at my new nails which looked like I'd had a top-notch French manicure. My nails had the inbuilt gloss of a topcoat and were the popping pink shade of a chemical nail polish.

And now?:

Three weeks on my nails were just as shiny and happy. What's more, the high-pressure massage technique pumped blood into my nails which made them grow faster than ever before. It's inevitable that I'll get back on the lacquer at some point, just not quite yet.

The Japanese Manicure, £30, and Pedicure, £40, is exclusively available at Nailberry, 19 Bute St, South Kensington, London

Alternatively, you can buy the P-Shine Kit online and DIY it at home yourself.

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