COSMOPOLITAN – Damaged nails? You can repair them

27 January 2014 by Ingeborg van Lotringen

Superstar colourist Josh Wood has barely opened his gleaming new ‘Atelier Beauté’ in London’s swish Holland Park, and the place is already buzzing. “I wanted a place where people could hand themselves over to the very best beauty experts in the world,” he says.He’s not lying: you can get your spray tan done by the charming James Read, your mani by beauty editor’s fave Adam Slee. Follicular trouble? Trichologist Ricardo Vila Nova, a man with possibly the healthiest-looking hair in the world, is on hand to fix it. There are bespoke face and body treatments by Natura Bissé (Kathy Phillips, doyenne of beauty journalism and the brains behind ThisWorks, waxes lyrical about them when I bump into her on the stairs, so I take note), and you can have a ‘life-changing’ ‘intimate wax’ by the no-nonsense Kim Lawless. And so on.I’m there for a simple buff and a chat with UK nail queen Marian Newman, who heads up her eponymous nail lounge at the Atelier, but she has a rather exciting treatment to try out on me, and it’s brand-spanking new to the UK (and currently exclusive to the Atelier). For the first time ever, she says, she can repair weak, brittle, and even severely damaged nails. “It’s a total game-changer,” she says.

The IBX System uses heat and UV light to help penetrate a blend of jojoba and avocado oil plus toughening agents deep into the nail, where it forms an ‘interpenetrating polymer network’ that fuses the nails’ top layers together with little flexible polymer links.

The result? Hydration is locked in. Nails are strengthened. Peeling stops, splitting stops. White spots disappear.

“Think of keratin treatments for your hair, where strength and smoothness is locked in for months,” says Marian. “This is the same principle.”

“Gel nails are everywhere right now, and inasmuch as they are safe if you apply and remove the gels properly, there is still always a payoff, as the regular acetone soakings inevitable dry nail out,” says Marian. “IBX will form a protective shield against this.”

“But it will also repair severely splitting, peeling, and ridged nails, and turn yellow nails pinkish again, in a few treatments. Healthy nails like yours will simply get stronger, pinker and more resistant to drying out and peeling, allowing them to grow longer and stronger.”

Hallelujah, I was just decrying my nails’ recent lack of strength and unwelcome new tendency to split and break. Marian paints on some solution, lets it dry, paints on some more, shoves my hands under her UV lamps (one for every hand – very flash) a second time. And that’s it. It takes about 45 minutes.

Three days on, my nails are gleaming. They look glossy straight out of the shower: water doesn’t seem to penetrate and soften them. They’ve returned to their pink and-white hues of yore, and there’s no splitting or breaking. And that’s all in a single treatment. If you want fabulous nails, I’d start forming an orderly queue at the Atelier right about now.