The Toenails

I keep my toenails polished for because I'm my dad's daughter. Here's how it works: Both my big toes are sensitive to getting ingrown. That is a hereditary gene that my dad so lovingly gave to me. So, because my big toes are prone to getting ingrown and infected, I try to wear sandals if I need to wear anything at all. (If you look closely you can see my flip flop line.)

For a while, I didn't know that to solve my ingrown toenail problem all I needed to do was wear sandals, and so for about three years, I'd had an ingrown and mostly infected right big toe. That was one reason I always wore closed toed shoes: so no one could see the disgusting puss and blood that oozed out of my purple, swollen toe. As you can see, both my toes are perfectly fine now because I found out that when I wore my flip flops, my ever painful toe didn't hurt anymore. It took a week of not wearing shoes or socks (and of keeping up with my daily cleaning) for the infection to finally go away and my toe to be at the point that I could touch it without crying out in pain.

But, even now with my toe looking perfectly normal (although I think some of the nerves are a bit damaged), it still looks ugly. I think that's a side effect of having an infected toe for so long. So to solve the problem of having ugly toenails and only wearing sandals to prevent them from getting any uglier, I've taken to painting them. I repaint them every two weeks or so, depending on how long it takes for the polish to start looking ridiculous.

And that's the story of why I polish my toenails.