This Nail Polish Makes My Toes Look Instantly Healthier

As temperatures climb and we enter the season of exposed feet, we're here to help, with all the best tricks for keeping your feet presentable, as well as comfortable. While this week happens to be the start of Fleet Week, we're doing our own take as summer begins. Welcome to Feet Week on the Strategist.

The idea of brightly painted toenails fills me with revulsion. I know I'm in the minority here, but for whatever reason, spackling one's gnarled stubs of foot keratin strikes me as the modern-day equivalent of people from the Middle Ages bathing biannually, and otherwise attempting to mask their own stench with what was almost certainly rancid essential oil. Feeling gross? Cover it up! It's just too crude a solution.

That said, if you're going to walk around all summer in open-toed shoes, you have to do something about your feet. In an ideal world, you give yourself a pedicure every week, but nobody has time for that. A good hack is Dior's Nail Glow, which I'm pretty sure I first discovered in an airport duty-free store. The copy in the advertisements for the product says it's a "nail enhancer," which I'm tempted to mock, but it's actually an accurate product description. The varnish is a translucent magenta in the bottle and goes on rosy-clear. By the time it's dried, the pink part of your nail is a little pinker, and the white part is a little whiter. The process is mysterious. How does a magenta polish make the white parts whiter? I don't know, but it does. (Dior calls it an instant French manicure, and I'd agree.) The chipping is basically invisible, and having naked-seeming toenails makes your feet look tanner in comparison.

The effect is that clean-looking appearance your feet get after a day at the beach: repeatedly rinsed in salt water and incessantly exfoliated with sand. Nail Glow is all I use in the summer. I've never gotten a compliment on my feet, per se, but I've also never been ashamed of them, which is good enough for me. Just a few weeks of Nail Glow'd toes will make your past pedicures seem downright medieval.

The number one mistake you’re making with nail polish

If you find that your at-home manicure chips a lot faster than after a visit to the salon, you could be making a very common mistake with your nail polish: namely, shaking the bottle.

In an interview with Allure, nail artist Simcha Whitehill broke down why shaking your nail polish is a huge no-no.

Whitehill, who goes by Miss Pop on social media, said that doing so "traps the air inside [the bottle], which creates those tiny pockets" of air. Those air bubbles are then sometimes transferred onto your nails and leave noticeable holes in your manicure — which can cause your nails to chip more easily.

How you load more polish onto the brush is important as well, according to Whitehill.

"Bubbles can also form when you shove the brush back in the bottle, so never pump the brush in and out the neck," Whitehill said.

Instead of using force, Whitehill suggests an alternative, gentle method. "Always just roll a bottle in your hands like you're rolling out playdough," she said.