BRYONY GORDON Nerve Damage, Hormone Issues And Cancer… I Thought My Gel Nails Were A Treat. Then An Expert Told Me Id Made A Disastrous Mistake – And This Is The Only Way To Fix It

Hold the front page, stop the presses and, if you’re standing up, you might want to find somewhere comfortable and sit down: for it is my sad duty to inform you that Abbey Clancy has broken a nail.

Oh, laugh all you want. Tell me to get some perspective, and perhaps focus on the goings-on in Iran and Greenland instead, but Clancy hasn’t just broken a nail . . . she’s been hospitalised because she broke a nail, no less.

The model and podcast host had to be put on a drip and given nerve-blockers because of a freak accident that happened during a New Year break to Dubai (where else?).

Clancy was reaching for a goodbye hug with a friend after a meal out, when one of her acrylic talons caught and bent backwards, ripping the nail away from its bed (yes, I winced too).

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‘It was pouring with blood,’ Abbey explained this week on The Therapy Crouch, the podcast she hosts with her husband, former footballer Peter Crouch. ‘Then it stopped and this nerve throbbed, which was going down my whole arm, down my shoulder, up my neck.’

A doctor came to her hotel room and immediately put her on a drip to prevent infection. She was then taken to hospital, where ‘they injected all my hand. They had to numb it – ugh, that relief. Because I’d been up from 11pm to 7am crying, hand under hot water, cold water, arm up, arm down.

‘It sounds pathetic. It sounds ridiculous . . . the doctor was like: ‘No form of painkiller will stop this pain – you need a nerve-blocker.’ So they removed my nail.’

Describing it as a ‘serious injury’, the mother of four admitted that she was embarrassed it had landed her in hospital. But I’m grateful to her for swallowing her pride and revealing her embarrassing mishap. In doing so she’s performed a public service to those of us who have become so obsessed with our nails, we will stop at nothing – not cost, nor warnings of UV radiation and toxic chemicals damaging our health – to get them done.

Indeed, anyone who pooh-poohs this as mere celebrity tittle-tattle is clearly unaware of the firm grip (if you will pardon the pun) that nail culture has on the nation’s women, with demand for manicures being so high that salons now outnumber banks on many high streets.

And I should know. I write this column with sad, stubby little fingers, my nails painfully filed down, almost to the quick, by a professional who was horrified to discover I’d been having back-to-back ‘builder gel’ treatments for years on end, without giving my hands a break.

Builder gel is a type of thick gel polish that makes your manicure utterly chip-proof. Without it my nails – once rock-hard, glossy and satisfyingly, keyboard-clatteringly long – are now pathetic, brittle and broken, requiring the kind of fallow period you’d usually apply to a field after intensive farming.

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How has it come to this? I started getting my nails done regularly four years ago, the monthly trip to the salon being my one concession to grooming. I rarely wear make-up, wash my hair only once a week, never bother with blow dries, and as for tweakments? No thanks. But somehow, my nails have become as crucial to my self-care routine as regular exercise and washing my face, an easy way to look vaguely put-together without actually being put-together at all.

It didn’t bother me that I was spending almost £1,000 a year on my nails. Nor could I be put off by the burning pain I’d feel every time the technician shoved my hands under the UV light to make the gel polish ‘harden’ to my fingers.

When I heard last year that the EU had banned one of the ingredients which helps said gel polish stick to your nails – because animal studies suggest it could harm fertility – I reminded myself that I was a 45-year-old woman on HRT.

My regular gel manicures had quickly become my adornment, my decoration, my one shot at glamour. The modern-day equivalent of the stiletto, I would drum my nails on the table and show the world I meant business.

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Imagine my panic, then, when I walked into the local salon on Sunday and found it chock-a-block with women tending to their talons before the start of the working week, and couldn’t fit me in until Tuesday.

I went into a state of nail neurosis. My hands were beginning to look like claws; I was Wolverine, if Wolverine painted his nails bright Barbie pink. What was I going to do? A friend recommended an app where I could book a nail technician to come to my house, and so it was that I found myself being tenderly taken in hand by a woman used to being booked for magazine and film shoots.

This was where my nail habit had got me – throwing out all my weekend plans and booking an emergency nail technician in a similar state of anxiety as I would an emergency plumber.

This woman took one look at my digits and urged me to break with my ‘builder gel’ manicures for a bit or risk damaging the long-term health of my fingers. She explained that you should give your nails a breather from so-called ‘builder gel’ (not to mention the salon drill, used to get rid of old colour) every three or four months, and I estimated that I hadn’t done this for about three or four years. Oops!

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So just like Abbey Clancy, I now find myself counting the cost of my not-so harmless little habit. No exposing my nail bed to toxic chemicals, no wincing as I expose my nails to UV radiation.

I’m calling time on this obsession with acrylics and gel nails before I take someone’s eye out . . . or, even worse, end up in hospital on a drip, having nerve-blocking anaesthetic injected into my hand.

Russell & Bromley still has shops?

The staid, sensible shoe shop Russell & Bromley has done the almost impossible and made the news, with the revelation that the 150-year old brand is in such financial trouble, Next is looking to take it over and shut all of its stores across the UK.

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It’s always sad to hear of yet another store biting the dust. But in a fast-moving world where online shopping rules supreme, the only surprising thing about this story is the fact that the expensive retailer has lasted on the High Street for quite so long.

Like millions of Stranger Things fans, I wept through the finale when it landed on Netflix this month. But some are struggling to let go of the hit series, with many suggesting on forums that the creators are going to release an alternative ending. Time to swap that Netflix subscription for a monthly trip to a good therapist, methinks.

It’s Posh and Becks 2.0!

Another day, another drama in the crazy, topsy-turvy billionaire world of the Peltz Beckhams. Apparently, Nicola has been ‘liking’ negative social media comments about her in-laws, and now Brooklyn has sent a letter to his parents instructing them to only communicate with him via his lawyers. But, judging from this picture of Brooklyn and Nicola at a farmers’ market in LA, where they both look spookily like Posh and Becks, it’s David and Victoria who should be issuing the young couple with a writ for stealing their style.

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I left X so long ago that it was still called Twitter. The last straw was when a stranger, behaving like an early version of Grok, Photoshopped a picture of me so that it had become disgustingly sexualised. Grok may be new but deepfakes aren’t – which is why I don’t buy Elon Musk’s pledge that Grok will now be prevented from creating sexualised images. It’s time all women boycotted the platform.