Allergic to gel on fingers but not toes

[SC32]

Hi,
I’ve been doing my own nails with gelish for about a year and everything worked fine. I then damaged my nails by removing the gel wrong so I took a break for 5 months to give my nails a rest.
Now that I’ve started using the gel again I seem to be reacting to it. My cuticles get itchy as well as under my nails.
The strange thing though, I’ve been using gel on my toes constantly and get no reaction. Why?
And how can I stop my fingers reacting.
I haven’t used any new products, everything is the same.
Thank You x

 

[rossantana]

Hi, I'm going through the same thing, have you found a solution to the allergies?

 

[SC32]

Hi, turns out, it’s something called contact dermatitis.

It happens when uncured gel touches your skin, which can be very hard to prevent. A lot of people suffer with this, but it’s just not spoken about enough.

My cuticles would get very itchy, and under my nail beds were swollen and covered in scabs. And my nails were lifting off the skin, starting from very low down, which was terrifying to see. I just had to keep trimming my nails and any crust, and wait for my nails to heal them self. I think you can get medicated creams to help , or a repairing nail varnish. I stopped using gel and stuck with normal nail varnish. Especially because my nails looked awful while they were healing and I needed to cover them up somehow.

Turns out my feet were allergic to, I just didn’t realise till eight months later, when both my toenails fell off

you can still use gel but have to be extremely careful to not let it touch your skin, but I was completely traumatised after my reaction so I’m just sticking with normal nail varnish. On TikTok, some peoples reactions are terrifyingly bad, so I’m not taking the risk

But don’t worry, if you look after your nails and give them time, they will go back to normal x