THE TOENAIL RECOVERY PROJECT BASED ON AN INDEPENDENT 721 USER TRIAL
THE TOENAIL RECOVERY PROJECT BASED ON AN INDEPENDENT 721 USER TRIAL
Two things were wrong with my toenail.
I only knew about one.
Christine is 66, from Kent. She was one of 721 people who tested Hofwell under blinded independent assessment. She took her own photographs as well, and they are further down this page. So are Susan, Kate, Margaret, Caroline, Patricia, Linda and Alan, in their own words.
Christine is 66, from Kent. She was one of 721 people who tested Hofwell under blinded independent assessment. She took her own photographs as well, and they are further down this page. So are Susan, Kate, Margaret, Caroline, Patricia, Linda and Alan, in their own words.
Told by Christine, 66, United Kingdom. Hofwell trial participant.
Told by Christine, 66, United Kingdom. Hofwell trial participant.
TWENTY YEARS
I have not worn sandals since about 2015.
I did not decide that.
There was no moment where I looked down and made a rule. I stopped one summer at a time, and by the time I noticed, it had already been years.
The bed socks started at about the same time, and I did not decide those either. Dark red ones. Kate bought them for me. I wore them every night, in August as well, and if you had asked me why I would have said my feet get cold, and I would have believed it.
I have never once connected the two until this year.
It started on one big toenail in my late forties.
It sat in the corner of that nail doing very little for a long time. Then it spread across the whole of it. Then it went to the toe beside it.
Both big toes now. One worse than the other.
Thick. Yellow-brown. Crumbly along the edge.
Too thick for ordinary clippers. That stopped working years ago.
If you have got to the clippers stage yourself, you will know the exact sound I mean.
Those are mine. Six, over twenty years.
The little ones out of the bathroom cabinet. Then a bigger pair. Then the biggest pair Boots had.
Then two proper ones, the sort with the spring, because by then the ordinary ones were skidding off instead of cutting.
The last pair I did not buy.
They were in my husband's toolbox in the shed. They are for cutting wire.
I went out and got them one Sunday afternoon in 2017, brought them into my own bathroom, and thought nothing of it at all. I thought: those will go through it.
Five I bought and one I fetched, and every single one of them only ever meant that the one before it had stopped going through.
I did not decide to end up with six. It happened one pair at a time.
The twenty-eighth of July, 2019. My granddaughter's christening, a garden in Whitstable, thirty degrees, and everybody had kicked their shoes off on the grass because the children were running about barefoot.
I kept mine on. Navy court shoes, on a lawn, all afternoon.
Kate asked me twice.
I have told that story since as though it were funny.
Here is everything I tried, in the order I tried it, and what each one actually cost me.
Tea tree oil first, around 2006, before I ever went to Susan.
Holland and Barrett, the small brown bottle. Ten pounds a bottle, and I bought it seven or eight times over the years. You are meant to do it twice a day, and I did it twice a day. At six weeks I thought the very edge of the nail looked better. I think now that I wanted it to. I threw two of those bottles out this January and both were still more than half full.
Then Vicks, because my friend Jean swore by it. She handed it to me outside church one Sunday in a Sainsbury's bag and she was so pleased with herself that I did it every night for an entire winter. Two pounds. The smell was the only thing about me that changed.
Then the Scholl paint-on. Fifteen pounds, after I saw an advert in a magazine at the hairdresser's. It is the one with the little disposable files in the box. Nine months. I was good with it, and I know I was good with it because Susan could see my filing marks on the nail when I came in.
Then Curanail. Thirty pounds a bottle, from behind the counter, so you have to ask for it out loud and then stand there while the pharmacist looks something up.
Once a week, filed down first, done properly, for the best part of a year. At week six I told Susan I thought the edge looked a bit better, and she agreed with me, because it did, a bit, at the edge. Somewhere around week thirty I stopped mentioning it. She never asked, and I have thought since that she knew perfectly well why.
Then the tablets, once. My GP mentioned them, and I read the leaflet, and there was a part about blood tests and about the liver, and I put it down. I was sixty. I was not doing that for a toenail.
And Susan, every five to eight weeks since April 2009.
Four things off a shelf. One conversation with a doctor. Seventeen years of appointments.
None of it changed anything, and in twenty years not one person ever told me why.
Last November my daughter Kate was in my kitchen and she asked me what the chiropodist had actually said it was.
I said thick nails.
She said no, what did she say it was.
And I stood there with the kettle going, and I could not answer her.
Seventeen years of appointments.
I did not know the name of the thing I had been paying somebody to file down.
Because in twenty years, nobody had ever told me.
NOBODY EVER TESTED MINE
No clipping taken. No sample sent anywhere. Nobody had ever looked at what was on my foot and said what it was.
Four products from the chemist.
Seventeen years of appointments. One conversation with my GP about the tablets, which I turned down myself.
And not one test.
Everything I bought had assumed it already knew what it was treating.
If nobody ever took a clipping from yours either, then you and I have been buying the same things for the same reason.
When I worked that out I was not upset. I was tired.
So I did the thing I should have done twenty years ago, which was look it up properly.
I found a leaflet. Not a forum and not an advert. An NHS leaflet, from my own part of the country, written for people with feet like mine.
It says nails like mine are harmless. That people are often keen to treat them for cosmetic reasons.
Harmless.
I read that at the same table where my daughter had asked me the question. And I thought about the sandals in the bottom of the wardrobe, and the seventeen years of appointments, and the summers, and the word somebody had chosen was harmless.
They are not wrong. It will not kill me. It has never made me ill a day in my life.
But somewhere, on paper, somebody decided that how my feet look is not a problem worth solving. And then nobody thought to mention that decision to me. So I kept going back to a shelf that was never built to solve it either.
Nobody lied to me. That is almost the worst part of it.
If nobody has ever looked at yours properly, it is still worth asking. I would say that to anyone.
And if somebody did look at yours, and told you exactly what it was, then you know one more thing than I do, and you are standing in exactly the same place I am.
But it would not have changed what I could see.
Because whatever started mine off twenty years ago is not what I am looking at now.
Which is when I realised there had been two things on my foot the whole time, not one.
And every single thing I ever bought was for the first one.
THE HARDENED LAYER
The tea tree oil. The Vicks. The Scholl. The Curanail.
Every one of them works the same way.
You paint it onto the top of the nail.
The top of my nail was never the problem.
The problem is underneath it.
Twenty years of nail, thickened and built up on itself, layer on layer.
And that one thing is doing all of it.
It is why the nail is thick. It is why the yellow will not come off, because the colour is inside those layers, not sitting on the surface where I kept trying to scrub it. It is why the top has gone ridged and rough. It is why it crumbles at the edge instead of clipping clean.
Four of them, over twenty years.
Not one ever touched the thing that was actually doing it.
One of the 721. Not mine.
That is the second thing. The one nobody ever mentioned, because nobody was looking at it.
Something began on that nail twenty years ago. I still do not know what it was, because nobody has ever told me. But that is not what I am looking at tonight.
And that layer is the one part of this that nothing I ever bought was even trying to reach.
I did not have to go looking for somebody to ask. I have been sitting in front of her every eight weeks since April 2009.
Susan does my feet. She has a treatment room in the front of her house in Faversham and she has been at it for twenty-two years, which means she was five years qualified when I first walked in.
In seventeen years she has taken the thickness off my two big toenails a hundred and fifty-four times. I have the number because she keeps a paper book, and she went back and counted them for me.
So when I finally worked out there had been two things on my foot and not one, she was the person I wanted to say it to. Not because she would agree with me.
Because if I had it wrong, she of all people would know.
She did not disagree with me. She sat down, which she does not do.
"What you are describing is thickening. The plate builds up on itself, and the colour sits inside those layers rather than on the surface. That is why things aimed at the top of the nail tend not to change how it looks, and why it stops clipping cleanly. Filing takes the build-up off. It does not stop it coming back."
Then she said the part I have not been able to put down since.
"That hardened layer is the thing I have been taking off you since 2009. I take the top down and it comes back up through the same hard corridor, because I have never once changed the corridor. I have only ever changed the height. I was not removing it. I was mowing it."
And then this.
"In a hundred and fifty-four appointments, I never took a clipping."
Susan, foot health practitioner, Faversham. First name only, at her request.
I was not removing it. I was mowing it.
Here is what I had never understood. Every single thing I bought in twenty years was made for thing one. The tea tree, the Vicks, the Scholl, the thirty pound bottle from behind the counter. All of it, aimed at the thing nobody had ever identified.
And not one of them was aimed at thing two. Not because thing two is difficult. Because thing two is not a condition. It is only what a nail does when it is left to itself for twenty years, and there is no prescription for that, and nobody sells anything for it, and so for two decades the largest part of my problem had nothing whatsoever pointed at it.
You would not paint over old flaking paint and expect a smooth wall. You would strip it back first.
That is all any of it ever was.
Twenty years of painting the top of the hardened layer.
Hofwell does not sit on top.
FORTY PER CENT
40% urea. I did not know what that meant either.
What I know now is what is actually on that shelf, because I went and looked.
Most of what is sold for nails is 5% or 6%. The strongest thing in the aisle after that is a heel balm at 25%, and that is for hard skin on your heels.
At 5% it sits on the hardened layer. That is what I had been doing for twenty years without knowing it. Paint on, dry, wipe off on the sheet.
At 40% it goes into it. Not a better formula. A different destination.
There is one other thing on that shelf at 40%, and I am not going to pretend there is not.
It is a kit from one of the big brands. About thirty pounds for a tube the size of your thumb. You put it on, tape a plaster over the toe, leave it a full day, soak the foot, then scrape the softened nail away with a little plastic tool.
Every day, for two or three weeks.
It works. That is not the problem with it.
The problem is that it is built to take the nail off. And you cannot do that every night for a year, on both feet, at my age, in a bathroom, before bed.
Same strength. Completely different job.
Hofwell is 40% in something you can actually keep using. After twenty years, that is the only difference that matters.
I did wonder, standing there, whether I could just buy urea on its own and be done. You can. I looked it up in the car.
What I did not know then is what a softened nail actually looks like. A softened nail on its own just looks soft. Dull. Dry. Brittle at the edge. You have taken the thickness down and swapped it for something else, and I would have been standing in the same bathroom a month later holding a different bottle.
There are five other things in that jar and they are all for that. Ridges down, dullness off, and it does not dry out, so what grows through looks like a nail and not like something that has been soaked.
One of them is tea tree oil.
I had a bottle of that in my bathroom for six years and it did nothing for me, and I know now exactly why. It was going onto twenty years of build-up. In this, by the time it gets there, the hardened layer has already given, so it is arriving somewhere it can actually reach.
I was not wrong to try it. I was putting it in the wrong place, and so was everybody who told me to.
And you can buy urea anywhere.
What you cannot buy anywhere is what happened when 721 people used this one for thirty days with somebody photographing it.
SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE
913 people aged 35 to 79 entered the trial, average age 61. Hofwell was used nightly for thirty days.
Photographs were taken daily through the first week under fixed conditions, then compared by blinded independent assessors for thickness, surface roughness, opacity and discolouration.
782 of us completed the thirty days. 721 of those met the standard for verified results.
Which leaves 192 of the 913 who did not, and I would sooner put that in than leave it out. The cuts were for application records, for whether people had used it as they were asked, and for photograph quality.
They found a visible change in 89% of those 721 by day 3.
Participants' own reports were recorded separately.
Nobody scoring the photographs knew which day they were looking at. Including on mine.
I did not believe any of it either. Not until it happened on my own foot.
So I took the photographs myself, because I did not trust what I was seeing.
Although the photograph was not the first thing. The first thing was my thumb.
On the third night I ran it down the nail without thinking, the way you do, and it went straight over. No snag. No ridge.
That nail has caught on the bedsheet every night for twenty years. I did not know I had stopped noticing until it stopped happening.
You do not need a camera for that one, and you do not need me.
Take a thumbnail and run it slowly down the length of the nail, from the base towards the tip. Do not press. You are not testing how hard it is. You are finding the point where the thumb stops travelling smoothly and catches.
On a nail with years of build-up on it, it will catch, and it will catch in the same place every time.
That snag is the top edge of the hardened layer.
Do it tonight, in the dark, in bed. You do not have to look at anything, which for a lot of people is the whole of the barrier. Note where it catches. Then do it again on Thursday.
That one is free, and it is yours whatever you decide about the rest of this.
The company still says seven days rather than three, because every nail starts somewhere different. Mine started twenty years in.
Ten seconds a night. A dab on each nail before bed.
No basin of water. No emery board. No sitting there for twenty minutes with a bag on my foot.
I never once got to the end of a bottle of anything. Not because it did not work. Because it was a faff and I stopped.
That is the whole method. Ten seconds, in the dark, before bed.
What it actually did to my nail is further down.
TEN DAYS
Boxing Day I was at Kate's, in Canterbury. They had had the hall carpet done in the autumn and everybody takes their shoes off at the door now. I stood in that hall with my coat still on and said my feet were cold, which is what I always say, and I kept them on. I sat in a warm house in a pair of navy court shoes for five hours. At about four o'clock my grandson, who is seven, asked me why I was wearing shoes indoors. Kate told him to leave Nanny alone. Nobody said anything else about it and we had the trifle.
Then on the ninth of January I went over on the ice outside my own front door and did something to my hip, so I was in the house and not driving.
Between those two things, I finally opened the drawer.
I took these myself. My own phone. Same foot, same spot by the bathroom window, same time of night.
I have not done anything to them.
Thick, yellow-brown, crumbling along the edge.
The kind you stop clipping straight and start hiding in closed shoes.
Day 1. Twenty years of it.
It showed at the thickest part first. Less hard. Less built up. As though the layers were starting to give.
Small.
But after twenty years of nothing, small and visible beats big and promised.
Day 3. The thickest part, first.
Thickness mostly gone. The yellow faded to nearly white. The surface softer, smoother.
Day 10.
There is one more photograph.
It is not in this sequence, and I am not going to put it here.
If I put it here you would not believe the first three. You would look at the last one and decide the earlier ones had been done to, and I would not blame you, because that is what I would have thought.
I took it on the twelfth of February.
Same foot, same spot by the bathroom window, same time of night, same phone. Thirteen months and two days after the first one.
It is at the bottom of this page.
I would rather you read what happened in between first.
Otherwise it is just a picture on the internet, and I have seen enough of those.
And the bit no photograph shows.
The first of February. I woke at three in the morning with cold feet and could not think why. I had not put the socks on. I had not decided not to. I simply had not done it, and I did not notice until I woke up.
Nothing had gone away by the first of February. The nails were still thick and still the wrong colour, and anybody looking at them would have said so. But I had stopped, in a room with nobody in it, and I had not noticed myself stop.
And then standing in my own kitchen with bare feet, not once thinking about them.
There is one more thing I should tell you, and I am going to leave it until the end.
I got it wrong when I ordered, and it cost me four days. I would rather it did not cost you the same.
So: one foot, one woman. Which is not evidence of anything, and I knew that while it was happening.
The question I had was whether it went the same way for anybody else. Because I was one of the 721, I could actually find out.
IT GOES THE SAME WAY FOR ALMOST EVERYONE
Across the 721 people in that trial, the same sequence keeps repeating.
The built-up thickness gives first. Then the yellow fades. The order barely changes.
89% had a visible change by day 3. Not because they felt they did. Because assessors who did not know which photograph came first said so.
Which is exactly what happened on my foot, before I had any idea it was happening on anybody else's.
"I remember showing my husband…"
Margaret H., 72, York. Nine years.
"I had more or less given up on my big toenail. It had been thick and yellow for years and had got to the point where I couldn't cut it properly with normal clippers. I'd tried the little brush-on treatments, tea tree oil, Vicks and goodness knows what else, but nothing ever seemed to get through that hard nail. With Hofwell I noticed the thickness changing before anything else. It started feeling softer and less solid, then I could actually trim it without the usual battle. I remember showing my husband because I was so surprised by how much had come away. It looks so much flatter and cleaner now. I only wish I'd taken a proper photograph at the beginning because the difference is quite something."
And there is a second thing that repeats, which no photograph picks up
People stop thinking about their feet.
An appointment booked without dread. Sandals worn to the shops and not just around the garden.
Clipping them straight again like it is nothing.
That takes longer than the nail does.
But it does happen. Mine did.
AND THEN IT KEPT GOING
There was one more thing in that trial that I did not know about until afterwards.
A hundred and eighty of the 721 carried on for twelve weeks.
Same standardised photographs. Same blinded assessors, still not knowing which picture came first.
Their nails looked better at twelve weeks than they had at four.
That is what decided it for me. Not that something showed up in three days.
That it did not stop there.
Five of the 180 who stayed in the trial to twelve weeks.
Which brings me to the things I would have been asking by now, and the first one is the one I would have asked loudest.
THE THINGS I WOULD HAVE ASKED
"I have never actually done anything about mine."
Then I would say a great deal has been done about it. It has just never been done to the nail.
The dark varnish from March. The closed shoe in August. Cutting it in the bath because it is softer in there. A bigger pair of clippers, and then a bigger pair after that.
That is years of work, and it is quiet, and nobody has ever noticed it.
And never having spent anything on this has one advantage. There is nothing to find out the hard way.
A hundred and eighty days, one email, nothing to send back, and you do not have to explain why.
"I never did anything about mine."
Caroline A., 48, Ludlow. Four years.
I never bought a single thing for mine, and that is the honest answer. I never went to anybody, because it didn't hurt and it never has, and you don't make an appointment about how something looks. I kept meaning to. That's a different thing from not caring, though I don't suppose it looks different from the outside. So when I started this I had nothing at all to compare it to, which turned out to be the useful part, because I couldn't have talked myself into anything. I had no idea what to expect. The thickness was what went first. Osric asked me what I'd been doing differently and I hadn't told him I was doing anything.
"I have had this for years. Mine are probably too far gone."
Mine were twenty years old, on both big toes, too thick for ordinary clippers.
That was the exact sentence I used about myself.
The thickness is build-up, and build-up is the part that softens.
Of the 721 people in that trial, 89% had a visible change by day 3. Nobody can promise you a timeline, which is what the 180 days are for.
I know what you are thinking next, because I thought it too.
"How do I know this is not another gimmick?"
You do not. Not yet.
I would not have believed it either, and I had spent twenty years learning not to.
Which is why the only things I would ask you to look at are the photographs and the trial, and why you get 180 days to decide with your own feet rather than my word.
"…something was actually happening instead of painting another liquid on and hoping."
Patricia W., 57, Bristol. Six years.
"I very nearly didn't order it, if I'm honest. I've wasted a ridiculous amount of money on toenail products over the years and I had it in my head this would be another one. I only took a photo before I started because I wanted something to point at when it didn't work, which sounds awful now but that was genuinely why I did it. The thing is, when you look at your own feet every day you don't notice anything. I put the two side by side after a week and the thick part just wasn't standing up the way it had been. That's the first time in years I've felt something was actually happening instead of painting another liquid on and hoping."
That is the big question. There were two smaller ones underneath it.
"Is it safe for me to use? And does it work on fingernails?"
It is a cosmetic cream, not a medicine. It can be used on fingernails as well as toenails.
If you have a diagnosed nail or skin condition, diabetes, or poor circulation, speak to your GP, pharmacist or podiatrist first. I would say that to my own sister.
"I have never heard of Hofwell. Who are you?"
A company that has made one product. Two years on it. Over a thousand people across several trials, and 913 through a thirty-day trial with blinded independent assessors before any of it went on sale. I was one of the 721.
One product. That is the entire company.
They are not a household name.
Neither was anything else that has ever worked for anybody.
Which leaves the one I actually lay awake on.
"At my age, is it even worth it?"
"My daughter noticed and said I'd finally got my sandals back out."
Linda B., 61, Norwich. Eleven years.
"This will sound silly to some people but I had spent years making sure nobody saw my feet. Socks on at home when family visited, no sandals, and I would never have booked a pedicure because I was embarrassed by the state of them. I did think at sixty-one I had probably left it too long to bother, if I'm honest. They didn't look perfect overnight and I hadn't expected them to, but after using the cream regularly they became much less thick, the yellow faded and they stopped looking so rough and neglected. Last weekend I wore open-toed shoes for the first time in ages. My daughter noticed and said I'd finally got my sandals back out. She won't have thought anything of it, but I did."
I stopped wearing sandals at 55 and I did not expect to start again.
The photograph at the bottom of this page was taken when I was 66. That is precisely why I am the one telling you this, and not somebody who caught it in the first year.
There is one more, and nobody ever says it out loud, which is rather the point.
"I have never told anybody about this."
"The thickness went first, which surprised me…"
Alan L., 68, Coventry. Fifteen years.
"I am a decorator, forty years of it, and I have spent my whole working life telling people you cannot put a finish on a surface that is not sound. I had four different things on a nail nobody had ever stripped, and I never once made the connection. I did not tell anyone either. Not my brother, not a mate, not once in the pub in fifteen years. I think a lot of men are in the same position and will not say it. The thickness went first, which surprised me, because I had assumed it would be the colour. I took my shoes off at the beach at Weston in August with the grandchildren, which I had not done since about 2011, and nobody said a word. That is the whole of it, really."
"I am reading this for somebody else, not for me."
Your mother, your wife, your husband. Then you already know they will not order it themselves, and you already know what they will say when it turns up. Mine would have told me off for the money.
The question you are actually asking is whether they will use it.
All I can tell you is why I stopped using everything else. It was never that it did not work. It was the basin of water, and the twenty minutes, and the emery board, and having to do it in the daylight where I had to look at them properly. I would manage a fortnight and then I would stop.
This is ten seconds in the dark before bed. Nothing to set up and nothing to look at.
That is the only reason I am still doing it, and I am not a patient woman.
If they are diabetic or have poor circulation, the same thing applies as I said above. Get them to mention it before they start.
And if you are still not sure, then there is one more thing, and it is the only argument I have left.
I ADDED IT UP
One evening I sat down and worked out what twenty years of this has cost me.
Not the missed things. Just the money.
The chiropodist, every five to eight weeks since April 2009.
Thirty-five pounds a visit when I started. Forty by the end of it. Fifty now.
Nine a year, seventeen years. A hundred and fifty-four appointments. Susan counted them out of her paper book for me and I did the sum twice, because I did not believe it the first time.
£5,410 since April 2009.
To have a thing filed down that nobody had ever told me the name of.
Then I added everything else.
Curanail, months of it. Around £30 a bottle.
The Scholl paint-on. About £15.
Tea tree oil, on and off for years. Seven or eight bottles at ten pounds.
Vicks. Two pounds.
And nail varnish. Twenty years of it, bought for exactly one reason.
Five thousand, nine hundred and seventy-six pounds, all in.
Not one penny of it ever got past the top of the hardened layer.
A jar of Hofwell is 30 nights.
Which is not the whole story, and I would rather you heard the rest of it from me than found it out on your own in three months.
HOW LONG THIS ACTUALLY TAKES
Here is the part nobody selling you anything says out loud.
Hofwell does not grow you a new nail. Nothing does.
A toenail grows about a millimetre and a half a month. A big toenail takes somewhere between a year and eighteen months to replace itself completely, from the base to the end of your toe.
So the nail I am looking at tonight is the same nail I will still be looking at in six months' time.
Day 1. However long yours has been there.
One jar. Thirty nights. The thickness comes down. The yellow fades. Still the same nail.
Three jars. Everything my photographs show, several times over. Still nowhere near the end.
Five jars. Better than it has looked in years. Not a new nail yet.
Ten jars. A different nail. This is the photograph at the bottom of this page.
One jar is 30 nights. About a millimetre and a half of new nail.
Three jars is three months. You will have seen everything my photographs show, several times over, and you will still be nowhere near the end of it.
Five jars is five months. Ten jars is ten months.
That is ten months of cream, not ten months on the calendar. Mine stretched to thirteen, because once the thickness has gone there is less to soften, and you stop needing it every night.
Ten is also the lowest the jars ever go.
Ten is what I would buy if I were starting again, and I will tell you exactly why. A big toenail takes a year to eighteen months to replace itself completely. Five months is not that. Ten months is very nearly it.
Which brings me back to the thing I said I would leave until the end.
THE THING I GOT WRONG
I bought one jar.
Thirty nights, for a twenty-year-old nail. Which tells you how seriously I was taking it at the time.
One jar is thirty nights, and it was thirty nights. That is not the part I got wrong.
What I got wrong is that it did not occur to me to order the next one until I could see the bottom of it. So there were four days at the end where I had run out and was waiting on the post.
Those four days were not good. I stood in the bathroom on the second of them and got properly angry, which surprised me, because I had watched nothing work at all for twenty years and had never once been angry about running out of any of it.
That is the first reason I say buy ten, or five at the very least. Not because ten is the biggest number on this page, but because thirty nights is a millimetre and a half of nail. Stopping in the middle of the first thing you have seen work in twenty years is a genuinely horrible four days.
And there is a second reason, which I only found out because I tried to buy one for somebody else.
Kate has the start of it on one toe. The same daughter who stood in my kitchen and asked me what mine was. She has been using it since May. Hers is a year old, not twenty, and I would rather she found out at thirty-nine what it took me until sixty-six to ask.
Hers went in about a fortnight.
Mine took thirteen months. That is the difference between one year of it and twenty, and it is worth knowing which one you have got.
I went to order her a jar in April.
There were none. Not a few days' wait. None at all, for a little over six weeks.
I asked about it, because I was annoyed. They said the 721 of us had gone home and told everybody, and they had not planned for that yet.
So I have been caught out twice now. Once by ordering one jar instead of three. Once by leaving it until there were none.
I do not know what is there by the time you read this.
I had them on the phone about the stock anyway, so I asked the other thing I had been wondering.
Why is it cheaper than it says on the jar? The jar says £49.55. That is what it launched at, and it is £34.95 today for one.
Because nobody has heard of it. That was the whole answer.
They would rather have it on feet and have people talking about it than sell it at full price to the few who already know. Which is also why it ran out in April.
THE TWELFTH OF FEBRUARY
Thirteen months and two days.
A year and eleven days after the night I woke at three in the morning with cold feet and could not think why.
Same foot. Same window. Same time of night. Same phone, and I have not done anything to it, the same as the others.
12 February. Thirteen months and two days after Day 1.
That is not the nail from January with the thickness taken down.
That is a different nail. It grew out from the base while I was doing ten seconds a night in the dark, and the old one went past the end of my toe and got clipped off in about the September, and I did not mark the occasion because I did not notice it happening.
Ten jars is what it took.
I want to be honest about that number, because it is not ten months of perfect nights. There were the four days at the start when I ran out and stood in the bathroom being angry about it.
There were six weeks in the spring when there were none to be had, because I had given mine to Kate. And I have missed nights the way anybody misses nights.
Three hundred nights of cream, spread across thirteen months, on a nail that was twenty years old.
That is what a year looks like.
Nobody showed me one before I started. I would have liked to have seen one.
So if you have looked at that photograph and thought you would like that, then buy the ten.
Not because it is the biggest number on this page.
Because that photograph is ten jars, and there is no shorter way to it.
Ten jars is £14.90 a jar. That is 50p a night, and it is as low as it goes.
Five is £19.99 a jar. Three is £24.98.
My chiropodist is fifty pounds now, for one appointment.
Postage is free, and you get an email the day it goes out with the tracking on it.
A hundred and eighty days. One email, nothing to send back, and you do not have to explain why.
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The clippers. That is the thing I was not ready for.
I clipped both big toenails straight last week. No filing. No fighting them. No sound.
It sounds like nothing written down. If you have got to the clippers stage yourself, you already know it is not nothing.
And here is the only deadline in any of this that I think matters.
Three days.
Not a year of painting. Not months of filing. In that trial, 89% of 721 people had a visible change by day 3, and it showed at the thickest part of the nail.
So the question is not really whether this works. You will find that out yourself, quite quickly, and if it does not, the 180 days mean it cost you nothing.
A few days for it to arrive, then three nights. That is the whole timeline. I am not going to pretend it is tomorrow.
The question is whether you start the clock this week, or put it off again.
Twenty years did not happen to me in one go. It happened one summer at a time, and every one of them was decided by me doing nothing in particular.
So what would actually have to happen tonight?
1. Choose your months. Ten if it has been there years.
2. First night, a dab on each nail before bed. Ten seconds.
3. Take a photograph on day one. You will want it.
4. Look again on day three, at the thickest part.
That is the whole thing. There is no step five.
The only part that is actually a decision is the first one. It is the one I put off for twenty years.
Close this page and nothing changes.
The closed shoes stay on. And next year you are reading something like this again, a year older, with the same feet, having paid somebody else to file them down another eight times.
That is another four hundred pounds, to the same person, for the same nail. She still will not have told you what it is.
I know exactly how that goes. I did it for seventeen years.
Or ten seconds tonight, a photograph, and a look at the same nail on Thursday.
There are two outcomes here and no third one. Either you see it with your own eyes, or the 180 days mean it cost you nothing.
I did not think I would ever be telling anybody about my feet.
I had stopped expecting anything to work.
Which turns out to be a different thing from having stopped wanting it to.
Christine, 66
United Kingdom, Kent
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A hundred and eighty days. Nothing to send back.
P.S. The bit that decided it for me was not the three days. 180 of us carried on for twelve weeks with the same photographs and the same assessors, and the nails looked better at twelve weeks than they had at four. It did not stop.
P.P.S. If yours have been there a long time and you are wondering whether you have left it too late, mine were twenty years old and on both big toes.
That trial had 721 people in it and 89% had a visible change by day 3. The average age was 61.
I am not telling you yours will do what mine did.
I am telling you that "too far gone" was the sentence I used about myself, and I was wrong about it.
P.P.P.S. I clipped both big toenails straight last Tuesday. Both of them, one after the other. No filing, no fighting them.
If you have got to the clippers stage yourself, you already know that is not a small thing.
That is the whole of it, really.
Everything else on this page is just how I got there.
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Postage is free, and you get an email the day it goes out with the tracking on it.
I do not know what is there by the time you read this.
A hundred and eighty days. One email, nothing to send back, and you do not have to explain why.