Cuticle oil, and why the carrier decides whether anything gets in

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Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

CND SolarOil Nail & Cuticle Care

Cuticle oil is one of the few things in the nail aisle where the ingredient list, rather than the price, tells you most of what you need to know.

It is also badly named. Most of what a cuticle oil does happens to skin rather than to cuticle, and the part that reaches the nail itself depends almost entirely on which plain oil the bottle is built on.

What you are actually oiling

Two structures get confused here, and the confusion is built into the way the service is sold.

The eponychium is the living fold of skin at the base of the nail. It seals the gap between skin and plate. It is not meant to be cut, and when a salon offers to remove your cuticles with nippers, this is usually what is being cut.

The cuticle proper is the thin, dead, translucent layer that the eponychium sheds onto the plate as the nail grows forward. That is the part that can be softened and gently pushed back.

Oil goes on both, plus the sidewalls, plus the free edge and underneath it. The free edge is the part most people miss and the part that splits.

Why the carrier decides

A nail plate is roughly a hundred layers of flattened keratin cells glued together, holding a modest amount of water and a small amount of lipid. Its flexibility is a function of that water. A dry plate is a brittle plate.

Whether an oil can get into that structure at all is a question of molecular size, and that is the whole argument.

Jojoba is not really an oil. It is a liquid wax ester, structurally close to the sebum your own skin makes, and it is the one routinely described as small enough to move into the plate rather than sit on top of it. That is why it heads the ingredient list on several of the cuticle oils that circulate among nail professionals, this one included, and it is why the ingredient list is more informative than the front label.

Triglyceride oils — sweet almond, sunflower, rice bran, olive, castor — are larger. They sit on the surface and slow the rate at which water leaves. That is a real and useful job. It is simply a different one, and a bottle built entirely on them is an occlusive with a nice story attached.

Mineral oil does nothing but sit on top, and does it extremely well. It is much maligned and it is not the villain it is made out to be. It is just doing one thing.

Vitamin E is a large molecule that mostly stays where you put it. It is often in the bottle to stop the other oils going rancid, which is a legitimate reason to include something and not the reason printed on the label.

Hydrolysed keratin, silk protein, collagen. These cannot get into a nail plate. They are far too large, so they form a film on the surface instead. It is the same argument as a molecule that works beautifully as an injectable and rather less beautifully in a jar: the question is never whether an ingredient does something somewhere. It is whether it gets anywhere useful from where you put it.

What the oil is for, which is mostly the skin

Keeps the skin at the nail fold pliable, so it stretches instead of tearing. A hangnail is a small open wound on a hand that touches everything all day, and most of them begin as dry skin with nowhere to go.

Keeps the plate flexible enough to bend and come back rather than snap. Flexible nails chip and split less than hard ones, which is counter-intuitive and is the single most useful sentence on this page.

Makes an ordinary manicure look considerably better, which is not nothing, and is most of the reason professionals reach for it constantly.

What it will not do

• It will not make your nails grow faster. Growth rate is set by things a bottle does not reach.
• It will not mend a split. A split in the plate grows out; there is no other route, and the only useful thing to do meanwhile is keep the edge filed smooth so it does not catch and tear further.
• It will not harden a soft nail, and it is not trying to.
• It will not do anything at all if you use it on Sundays. This is a product where the dose is frequency.

The part that decides whether it works

The applicator, oddly.

Two or three times a day is where the difference lives, and nobody sustains that with a dropper bottle that has to be unscrewed over a sink. A pen or a brush applicator that lives in a coat pocket, a desk drawer and a bedside table gets used. One good bottle in a bathroom cupboard does not.

Apply after washing your hands rather than before. Part of what you are doing is holding water in, so there ought to be some water there to hold.

One caution

Fragrance is the most common cause of contact allergy in cosmetics, and cuticle oil is a product you put on your hands several times a day and then leave there. If your fingers start itching, or the skin at the nail fold goes red and flaky, the scented oil is a reasonable first suspect, and an unscented one is a cheap way to test it.

The product

Jojoba sits first on the ingredient list, which is the only thing on that label doing real work. It has been sold to salons for decades and it is sold as care rather than as a fix for anything — and the small bottle is the one to buy, because the point is having one in three places rather than a large one in a cupboard.

The one people are searching for is the CND SolarOil Nail & Cuticle Care.

CND SolarOil Nail & Cuticle Care

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by CatieH, who covers nails and hair here.