Monday 4 February 2013

Cheap earrings and sensitive ears: is clear nail polish the answer?

I have a long-running love/hate relationship with cheap earrings. They lure me in with their prettiness and sparkles and then ATTACK my earlobes from the inside and make me feel like my ears are about to fall off.

But I recently heard there's a solution to all this madness, in the form of clear nail varnish. Apparently if you coat the post/hook of the earring with clear nail polish, it protects your ear from the metal underneath. I was amazed that I hadn't heard about this before as it could be the answer to all my (admittedly only earring-related) problems! So naturally I had to try this out for myself.

The method
I took the nearest clear nail varnish, which turned out to be my Sally Hansen hydrating base coat, removed as much as I could from the brush, and painted a thin layer on the hooks of my earrings. It dried pretty quickly as it was such a thin coat, but I propped them up on a clean coaster for a while just to make sure. I rubbed them with my finger to make sure there weren't any sharp bits, then I tried them in my ears later that night.

The results
Normally if I put non-gold earrings in, they start aching immediately and become unbearable after about 10 minutes. With these earrings, I didn't feel anything for about an hour, and then my left ear started aching (but nowhere near as much as normal). The right ear was still fine, but I took both of them out at this point as I was out in public and didn't want my ear jewellery to be lopsided!

The conclusion
I've decided the most logical explanation is I could have missed a small bit on one of the earrings. That's the difficulty of clear nail polish!

But the results were certainly interesting and I think I might follow up this experiment with a second coat of polish and test it out in the safety of my own home (where jewellery lopsided-ness is less of an issue).



1 comment: