Acrylic nails

[Parizade]

This seems to be a big fashion trend, and I have seen teen age girls working at minimum wage jobs who think paying for these nails is a smart move.

The average cost of acrylic nails is $50, but maintenance of the nails requires another $25 twice a month. Just for fun I plugged these numbers into a compounding calculator.

If a 15 year old girl chose to invest that money instead, and managed to average an 8% ROR, she would have about $50,000 by age 40.

[Welmoed]

I used to do acrylic nails (pink & white, to look like a French manicure). Then I started adding up the expenses and realized I was sinking money into something that was really just vanity. So I soaked them off and endured the recovery period (about 6 weeks, until the new nail grew out completely). Now I do my own nails. No, it's not perfect, but so what? As long as my hands are clean, it really doesn't matter what my nails look like. But I do have fun with different nail polish colors... today my nails are gold!
--Welmoed

[Parizade]

Acrylic nails can be lovely, but they are such a money trap! And the girls who get them seem to be the ones who complain that they can't pay the rent or buy groceries.

Financial independence, or even simple the financial stability of being able to pay your monthly bills, is so much more valuable than pretty nails in my book.

[sideways8]

I think it's especially silly to get fake-o nails if you have to type a lot or do anything with your hands, really. Thankfully, I never got into the acrylic nails thing because I've been playing the piano since I was a kid and my teacher would sometimes make me clip my nails before the lesson started. I know people who regularly get their nails done (mani AND pedi) and yet complain about being broke... they also tend to have the super-duper expensive cable/DVR/speed-of-light internet bundles.

[nolajo]

Oh Lord, the piano-nails issue! Not to mention I played water polo for years - yet another reason you couldn't even have regular length nails, let alone acrylics. As much as I liked the really pampering experience of getting my nails done, it's hard to justify the cost; I think I've gotten them done about three times in the last five years and at least two of those times someone else was treating. I do enjoy painting my own nails though and have gotten reasonably good at it, but it's as much to have the enforced down time as anything else. And since I've amassed a reasonable (read: kind of large) collection of polish, I can definitely rotate through a bunch of options without getting anything new. Perhaps the habit is more vain than ideal, but it's at least not making a big dent in my financial goals, unlike those with acrylics and all their maintenance costs.

[jwystup]

Oh wow, yeah. I've always had longish nails naturally and in high school I loved doing different things with polish, now I don't even like maintaining polish. Maybe all the typing I do nowadays makes it chip faster? I don't know, anyways, one time a few years ago a friend found out I'd never had acrylic nails done and she said something along the lines of "OMG you totally have to do it! I'm going tomorrow let's go together!". (This was before she had a kid, now I never see her with fake nails, but she's still the one to suggest shopping as an activity...) So I went with her and had total sticker shock when they were finished and were like "okay $32", luckily I had enough cash on me but wow, I was pretty much done with fake nails immediately. I never went back for maintenance, I actually found a kit at walmart that you could do your own so I bought that for way cheaper than the maintenance and used that instead, and got another use out of it as another set of nails.

Since then I have done the walmart gel nail kits (way easier than the acrylic kits, as the gel is self-smoothing) for occasions like when I was in a wedding (actually the girl mentioned above's wedding!). You can get 2 uses out of the different-sized nails for like $8 (plus maintenance). Still a splurge but nowhere near as much as going to get them done! They aren't quite as strong but then again, they're easier to get off too, and probably nicer on your natural nails. Typing is weird with them but I've gotten used to them in a day or two, I think that is worse on my flat laptop keyboard than on the real keyboard at work anyways.