Howdy all! I was really unlucky in having both of my thumb nails break right in the middle of the nail bed. I have no idea how that happened. I only even noticed when I had them caught on something. Plasters were too awkward and the special finger bandages made everyone think I was leper, but worse made it really difficult to type on my phone. Struggling to come up with a solution, I vaguely recalled a really cool how-to guide that I found last year about fixing a broken nail with a tea bag. Instead of doing the sensible thing and Googling how to do this, I instead chose to recall it entirely from memory. What ensued was a horrible mess that I somehow made work. Yay!

However, when I posted the results I had a bunch of people asking me how I did it. I couldn’t see myself going through it all over again just for illustration purposes. But! Thanks to my extreme laziness and toddler level distraction I did it badly the first time!

So here is Take Two of my awesome broken nail teabag adventure, enjoy!

First things first!

Go through the whole process before making this how-to but fail badly because you are doing something fiddly with your non dominant hand. Bother. Pick at the nail till you find the earlier nail break. Curse TF2’s MvM mode for distracting you the first time you tried to do this.

Use this time to reflect on your life choices. Take off the nail varnish, examine the damage. Cool.

Next!

Cut out parts of the teabag. Pay more attention to whatever you’re watching on TV and lose the initial cut out piece. Curse everything. Cut out a smaller piece that will cover the nail break. Don’t worry about sizes, it’ll probably be fine. You’re using a dark nail polish anyway.

Use the fancy glue that you bought at Boots. Honestly, buy the brush kind it is just so much easier for this, especially as it’s so fiddly and you have no idea what you’re really doing anyway. God, why didn’t you just go to the nail salon like a regular person? Well, you’ve come this far, so good job! Stick the teabag down. Disregard any weird colours, dark nail polish to follow.

And voila! All done, now you won’t have nightmares of catching your nail on something and ripping it clean off the nail bed. All that’s left to do is clean up the edges and you’re good to go. Just.. don’t let anyone look too closely at your nails.

This is the advanced tutorial, but if you’re looking for something a little more basic, then check this out. This is awesome.

05/02/2014 EDIT:

Turns out that you can do the same thing with one ply tissue paper and lots of glue. So far, I’m actually liking it more than the teabag fix!