Don’t Fool Around With Your Tools

Jill has some good suggestions for which tools you should consider replacing and for ways to minimize the cost for you in purchasing new tools and brushes. Besides being a really nice treat to have new tools for ourselves, as nail technicians updating our tools is one of the best ways to be sure we are able to perform at our peak.

Have you ever held onto an acrylic brush well past its prime? Or have you realized that you have to fight your clippers or nippers to cut anything smoothly. Without noticing it, tools that are not working as efficiently affect your productivity, and we all know that if it affects your ability to work efficiently it can affect your income. If your nippers cannot cleanly remove a hangnail or your clippers cannot cut the toenails smoothly then that adds time to your services. An acrylic brush that cannot hold the correct liquid ratio is also going to add time to your enhancements. Nothing for me is worse than having to struggle to get the correct ratio of liquid to powder because my brush is unable to hold the right amount of monomer.  

The rule of thumb I use is to get a new acrylic brush for my pink-and-whites every three months. The old brush then becomes my glitter/color acrylic brush. I always have two brushes ready to use depending on the type of service I am doing. For my square gel brushes I make sure to keep an eye on the edge of the brush to be sure that it isn’t starting to flare or bend because that makes me work much harder to carve a gorgeous smile line and if the corners are bending too much it makes it more difficult to pull my gel into place. I purchase brush covers for these to be sure they are kept clean and free of dust. It also helps to keep the sunlight from our windows from starting to cure the gel in my gel brush.

When you are fully booked these tools being tired and worn can make your job harder to accomplish. Over the course of a day these extra minutes can make you run late. Running late going in to the holiday season that is the last thing a busy nail tech needs to worry about. So updating your tools to keep our productivity up is a great way to stand out from the rest and be the best.

— Sandy