Jenna: Hi there and welcome to another episode of Elevate Yourself podcast.

I talk a little bit about nails. I just wanted to speak a little bit about the benefits of regularly getting pedicures and manicures. I think especially pedicure is really overlooked for many people. I feel like it used to be a lot more popular, and it's like kind of gone out of popularity a little bit because maybe we don't see our feet as much or something like that versus you see your hands all the time, but definitely the feet are as important or if not more important to maintain. So let's just get right into the benefits.

So firstly, getting your nails done regularly prevents infections. So fungi thrive in dark, damp places, which is what attracts them to the tissues of the feet. With our feet constantly exposed to moisture. It's easy to develop fungal infections on our feet. So obviously if you're not taking care of them regularly removing things like dead skin that can also create a great place for a fungus to like thrive in and grow. So regular maintenance is definitely really required and when we're in our ski boots all the time or a winter boot on you you generally sweat a lot more than if you have like a flip flop and it's like sunny outside and your foot is able to breathe a lot more.

So winter is definitely a time where we neglect our feet and then we really need to get on it otherwise really bad things can start happening. So it promotes healthy blood circulation during a manicure and especially a pedicure. You receive a massage on your arms if it's mounted here lower legs and feet here and it promotes healthy circulation reduces muscle tension and improves joint mobility. It boosts nail health as well.

So with regular manicures and pedicures, the chances of your nails developing fungi and other infections are greatly reduced. Also the exfoliation during the appointment will remove any dead skin cells and encourage new skin cell growth which leaves your nails stronger and healthier. It prevents calluses obviously, and healthily BC states that calluses are caused by repeated pressure friction on an area of the skin.

So that means that the pressure of your shoes walking around barefoot, walking around for long periods of time will cause calluses to appear on your feet. calluses have the potential of being painful and can be removed by your nail technician and the technician can also help you prevent getting calluses of the scrub off the dead skin cells on your feet and when you do that regularly, you don't end up with a big huge callus on your foot. So if you don't do that though, if you let it build up then it becomes a lot harder to get rid of it and sometimes you can have to go to your doctor and get it removed by them so dealing with it on a routine basis is much better.

Especially getting pedicures reduces back pain as well. You may be familiar with the calluses that form on the soles of your feet. And so besides being frustrating and painful, these can also affect your body weight distribution and cause back pain. So getting the regular meetings and making sure you don't have a distribution of insoles on the bottom of your foot that are causing like imbalances and stuff in posture can also really be beneficial.

It can make your hands and feet look younger too. Again, mani here obviously with polish and everything's all cleaned up and it does definitely improve the appearance of your hands and feet. It also improves mental health. Just doing self care is really important for that any type of self care but hands is really nice too because or feet when you're not afraid to show your feet like if you're going out to the beach or whatever that's like just an instant boost of confidence. And same thing with hands. Many of us use our hands for different things like working or out the garden and we can become self conscious about our hands looking masculine or rough and not want to show them and kind of like be ashamed of them.

So it's awesome not to feel that way and to instead feel you don't really have anything to hide. So whether it's been a particularly stressful day to or a hectic week, taking time to treat yourself with a manicure-pedicure can do wonders for your stress levels. The massage relaxing experience and pampering of your feet will take your mind off of any tension and mental health. Another thing about confidence too is an option to pick yourself through nail design. Just like the clothes you wear tend to lead to increased confidence or individuality to your hands or anything to be self conscious about after attempting soft giving your fresh coat and polishing removing any hangnail. So it's a lot easier to be confident when you're like presenting to people or when someone reaches out to shake or even when they're taking a picture of you.

So just nice to be always prepared that you might be wondering how often should you get manicures and pedicures so professional suggests two to three weeks between each manicure and pedicure is ideal but for keeping your nails in the best shape. within this time frame your nails and cuticles begin to dry and jagged. So another thing that is definitely important to notice whether it's winter or summer so in winter, you might be able to get away with more like three weeks for your fingers and even four weeks with your toes. But in summer our nails definitely do grow quite a bit faster.

So with a pedicure, you might want to come in a little bit or often especially if you're doing hiking and stuff and you don't want your toenails to be touching the top of your foods can be kind of bruising, your nail or anything like that. You want to make sure that they're like trimmed up for sure. And same thing with your nails, especially if you have acrylics or if you have general nails on when it grows out past that point. It can cause snapping and it's really painful. So you definitely want to leave more than I would say three millimeters of growth from your cuticle when you're polishing out. Really big problems happen and you're just not going to be able to be confident with your nails when you feel like there's no right way. So definitely for me it's in the summer then which herb is necessary. So how to choose the right level.

Although getting manicure and pedicure appointments regularly has a ton of benefits. It also poses risks when you fail to choose the right font. So what are the things you should look for in a nail salon? So number one is definitely expertise every nail technician is different and you're not going to want to just go to any nail technician you should really research. Is nail art important to you or do you want really natural looking nails? color selection from the salon is also a factor as well. You really want to pick someone who's going to be ticking off all the boxes that are important for you. There are nail artists that don't do nail art at all too. So you do want to just do some research into the portfolio. Send a picture of the nail art to your studio and see if it's a possibility. I would say always have some realistic goals because sometimes those photos are photoshopped or they could have been a set of nails that is done lightly in the city and took like four hours possibly even for that nail artist to do.

And in the city, there's a bigger market so they might be making 200 to $300 even like not even joking for one set of nails that looks so perfectly that so you really do have to like skill your expectations too because you definitely cannot get the same look and you're not also paying same price and you can't expect someone to be spending four to five hours to make that exact same picture when you're coming in for just a regular nail appointment.

So you do want to calibrate your expectations because as we know everything we see on Instagram and Facebook, it's not always attainable in real life. And that would be a real good example. It's definitely not always possible, given like just time constraints in the studio and not everyone can afford two to $300 to get their nails done. For sure. I know that's not me either. So back on expertise, ask your manicurist about the products they use for your requested type of service and make sure to be treated with professional and safe products only. So if you're going to a professional salon in Canada, it's actually illegal to order products that are not made in North America because your insurance company is not going to allow you to do that. So if it isn't insured, and well a properly insured establishment, they won't be ordering their stuff off of Amazon likely and they will all be professional products sourced from North America.

And the reason is that there's a lot of shady stuff that happens in this industry and when you go outside of North America, we don't control the imports, the safety of any of imports or imported products really that much unless someone is like whistleblowing on a company. It doesn't really happen or there's like a severe neglect case that can somehow be traced back but that's very, very, very difficult to track back to that company.

So there's just not enough resources in Canada to do that. But in North America, we do have our own health and safety standards that do protect us but not only that we do have a law that protects us so your insurance company establishment can actually sue another company and that's what keeps everyone in check. Great people are doing your research. People are caring really about what they're putting in these products, because they have a lot to lose and they know they can be sued for this. And that's the way that accountability happens in the system when you leave like Europe is definitely an exception from this but also most European companies will have a North American supplier that imports the product.

And so you do order from that North American supplier you don't order straight from there. Those products are usually high, high standard in Europe, but lots of the other places around the world, maybe not so much. And so if you are ordering directly from those places without going through North American distributor distributor or even if it is a shady North American district distributor because they can just claim bankruptcy right and there's no way for any accountability to happen. They just start a new company in that case, but that really can't help live or when your business is based in North America because it's your reputation.

It is going to follow you if you're you can be held responsible as a CEO or an owner of a company for negligence but it is just basically impossible to do that with a supplier product supplier that's coming out of places like for example China or something like that. That's why those products are also a lot more expensive to use because they are safer and so like if you are going to legit salon, they will be abiding by those rules, because also the likely have a lot to lose and they don't want to mess with their insurance. They want to make sure that they are playing by the books so they don't have any problems and they keep their clients safe.

So education you're gonna watch that your nail technician has the correct education to do that. If you don't feel that you can always ask about everywhere trained and oftentimes doesn't nail techs will be doing upgrading with her courses, stuff like regularly. Cleanliness. So this is I think, one of the topics for a nail salon, cleanliness and sanitation is paramount. Needless to say the playspace be top-notch sanitary condition. Every client comes with their own microflora leaving bacteria in them to come in contact with so you want to end up with a bacterial infection do so take a look around. Make sure that the tools are properly disinfected after dealing with it and also check disposable items are thrown away after you get so close and that the manicure table must be fresh and perfectly clean. So at Elevate, we use the CS20 disinfector tools tool to disinfect between every client and every single day.

Definitely thrown out or are all fresh and washed on a sanitary cycle. And we also go above and beyond with cleaner pedicure bowls or pedicure bowls also do not have jets which is really important if you're going to a place with jets it's pretty much impossible for them to clean them without like taking apart the whole mechanism of the jet which no one does.

And so if you see a jet I would run and also like those fish pedicures like you cannot sanitize. It's in my opinion. It's super gross, but it's kind of like having sex without a condom. How do you create a barrier there? It's like that fish is touching someone else's feed. It could even be cut foot like so you could be in at risk for hepatitis. If you have a cut on your foot to like there was blood transfer possible if that fish is touching someone with an open wound and then touching your foot with an open wound.

So I think that's like the grossest thing in the world. So you will not see a fish ever elevate but I would really caution against that too when you are going to any kind of like tropical resort. Yeah, they say they have saltwater in the salt in the water or something but that is not going to keep you safe from those biohazard. So please don't don't go there.

Just pass it by when you're on vacation. And so yeah, that's why we don't have jets or any of those things. Our bowls are easily sanitizer bubble and we make sure we have tuberculous idle disinfectant, it's antifungal, its antiviral, it is killing everything and of course we are also screening are clients. So if there is active infection, we do politely, have different ways of dealing with those problems and making sure that the client has the tools that they need to and the education to get on the right path before they can receive a full service.

So there's a lot of places where if you have an active infection on your foot, you really need to go to a doctor and we are not doctors so we can't assess it. So the protocol would be to politely and kindly refer to the doctor and there's a whole episode we have on this. So the podcast episode with Jane on fungal infections is definitely something you want to listen to if you think you could possibly have a fungal infection, or if you're interested in how we dealt with fungal infections. I would definitely check that podcast episode out.

It is number one most listened-to episodes for a reason. And I know this is something that lots of places don't like talking about. There are a lot of places that are scared to talk about it, but we really don't roll that way and no one really benefits by being afraid of talking to you about things and no one benefits of hiding things either. So it's asked that we just like keep this all out in the open and don't have any shame about talking about it because from time to time it's possible that this could happen to anyone. You go to like this awesome resort. You forgot your flip-flops. You want to go into wherever you do that little and you hope everything's good and like maybe something happens in life. So it's going to be like a shame to hide.

Definitely, something to ask about get educated on and definitely bring it to life. I know that bacteria and fungal infections, they grow in the dark. So you bring that information to light you can get past we just want the best for our clients. So we don't really want to be a part of bringing those situations to light so that everyone can get over them. So customer service that's another really important thing. Professional nail technicians must be ready to take responsibility for explain all the possible risks and specific guidance to ensure the services are for your needs. I like feeling supported when I go to for myself just like that. I've created a bunch of quizzes available that helpful server web and like things like this podcast to help educate clients.

And I feel like when clients are educated about to make the best decisions for themselves. I definitely would quickly said is going to put some energy into taking care of the clients, right of the nail technician space to just good karma policy is a studio and it's not about the money anyway. So I think that that feels good. So that's why I've created that try our studio as well.

But it's really important for your manicures to be honest with you in terms of safety. And yeah, so that's basically what we were also doing by just like going above and beyond with podcast and our website has tons of information on it and those quizzes like could you have foot fungus? I think that's awesome because I've never seen that before and I've all I've wondered that myself before I did not I worked at a spa like all my 20s and I was scared shitless of going for a pedicure.

I was scared of the fact that I could have fungus. I was thinking my feet are gross. And the whole time it was like pretty much in my head. So that was a really powerful for me, I think to be able to share with people because you sometimes you'd have these things in your head that you're all like nervous and self conscious about but they're not really founded in reality. So there are cases of course and honestly if you ever think you have nail fungus you really shouldn't your doctor because they're the only ones that can diagnose it.

There are signs of the things that you can really see and ins and are to pick them out obviously because we can't work on the active connections but so in educate you on what to look forward to maybe just a bruise on your nail or something like that. Or sometimes if you wear red polish for a super long time you can also get discoloration that is not fungus related either. So there's a lot of different things that hopefully we're gonna put your mind at rest a little bit or give you an inclination to get dealt with.

Do you think you'll have a physical or fungal infection? You guys have gotten a little more clarity on nails and manicures and especially about pedicures and if you are at all worried about your feet, because I know lots of people right now they're looking for spring cleanups.

But if you think something might have happened to your feet over the winter, like a fungal infection, for example, now is the perfect time to be dealing with it because if you don't deal with it now this is a slow and steady process. Even if you go to the doctor, they're gonna prescribe something where you have to like it's like really hard on your liver and it still takes a while. So starting the process now with either something from a doctor's appointment or something over the counter. Like we have a really good tool at Elevate that was developed by a doctor it's not prescription based but it does target fungal infections in the nail and with consistent use like so it has to be daily use you can really see a lot of stress and your nail meant and you don't have to do such a very short, more toxic treatment like they offer through the doctor's office. Because sometimes less is more. It's just a good result. But you have to take time. So now would be the time to address that before summer. You don't want to be dealing with it during so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out I'd love to answer them and thank you so much. Another episode of Elevate Yourself podcast.