Dear LPG readers, 

There are no two ways about it. Many members of the fairer sex quickly give up the daily makeup routine once they retire. I base my findings on my friends and me, and how different things look when we recently shared and compared some of our retro pictures taken a couple of years before retirement. 

Perhaps it is only the circles that I move in, but I think it might be 'mind over matter' for some. The friends that I am talking about, and I have been retired for about 10 years on average. Many of my older friends feel they have less reason to look in the mirror more than once a day now, while getting the same facial result at the end of a makeup session takes longer and longer as we get older. The thought of other people seeing us as overdoing it also puts us off.

But while we don't bother much with our faces, our hands are quite a different matter. I look at mine all the time, and I can see what the years have done to them. Wearing a bit of nail varnish isn't a bad thing, and I don't keep it on too long, but making sure it looks a bit colourful has taken over from all the time I used to spend on my face.  

My nail painting routine has rubbed off on my friends, too. All five of us do quite a bit of comparing the latest colours we are trying out, and a couple of our group have particularly short nails and have taken to getting them done regularly at a salon.  

We 'DIY-varnishers' have the odd short, beautifully coloured nail hiding amongst the ten, but we have noticed that the nails of our friends who have the professional finish have gradually got longer and longer. 

For me, there is nothing worse than seeing a short nail, especially if the break is really low and tears it from your finger. I have visions of how it snapped and what pain it caused. If I have even one short fingernail, I can have significant problems doing things like fastening a button or finding the edge of the Sellotape.   

But I also know how difficult it is for me, with my moderate-length nails, to press the right keys on the television's remote control. The difficulty I have in hitting the right buttons on a flat computer keyboard is always hampered by my relatively short nails. One of my friends went to a wedding recently and decided on what I can only describe as frighteningly long nails for the occasion.    

I have to say that, partly because of the cost of having them done, and partly because of the potential pain of having one of those stuck-on nails ripped off her real finger nail by accident, we all found ourselves trying to help her work out how to do some of those day-to-day things that you would not even realise would be a problem depending on the length of your fingernails. 

In case any readers are planning a particularly glamorous set of nail extensions for a special occasion, I need to pass along what we have learned. 

SM, Croydon

SM shares her research into living with long nails…

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…and LPG found some nails that make your average long nail seem short…

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