Yo, check those photos out. Gollum called, he wants his fingers back. That’s a slight exaggeration but they are gross. Ga-ross. How do I end up with stained nails like this? Oh yeah, it’s because I wear dark polish all the time. Like seriously, I cant remember the last time my natural nails have seen the light of day, and I paint my nails at least twice a week. That explains a lot. So today I want you to come on a little adventure with me. I’m going to try to get these stains off my nails. I have two different DIYs to try and if one doesn’t work then we’re moving on to the second one. Something will have to work, right? Let’s hope so.

DIY #1

Denture Tabs:

First of all, I want to say how sweet the checkout lady at target is for not looking at me like I was insane when I marched my 28 year old butt up to her counter with freaking DENTURE CLEANER. You are either oblivious, super kind, or have a sick poker face Target lady.

So according to internet forums denture tabs will clean your nail stains, but the actual process on how to use them seemed vague and nobody specified a brand. So I bought the cheapest ones I could find and did this . . .

Took out two bowls, put one denture tab in each.

Added warm water to each bowl, but not HOT water . . .it said that on the box. They were probably referring to the dentures, not my nails but it sounded like good advice anyway.

I let them soak for about ten minutes. Some other people on the Interwebs said 3-5 minutes, but then their results weren’t great so I decided not to screw around and go for ten. That was about as long as the water stayed bubbly anyway.

So they are definitely less stained, but the results were not super impressive. This may be very effective if you are someone who stained their nails one time with a dark polish and are looking to just take away that slight yellowing. Not for me though. I need heavy duty help here.

DIY #2

Lemon & Baking Soda:

In addition to this I also saw people use baking soda and peroxide, but I didn’t have any peroxide so I went with lemon. I have tried to use lemon by itself before and it didn’t yield much of a result. Baking soda is the duct tape of the kitchen though, so that gave me some hope

I squeezed the juice of one lemon into a bowl and then added two tablespoon of baking soda

OMG it bubbled up! So fun! I was a little apprehensive to stick my fingers in there, but I did it because I’m dedicated, dammit.

The bubbles went away quickly, and there was a runny paste of lemon and baking soda at the bottom. I smeared it over my nails and let it sit for a minute.

I rubbed the paste into each nail for about 30 seconds each. It was tedious, that’s a long time to scrub but check it out . . .

SO MUCH BETTER! They aren’t perfect but thats a huge improvement. I can’t say for sure that it would work as well if I hadn’t gotten some of the stain off with the denture tabs first, but this seemed to make a much more noticeable difference.

Here’s the before and after:

They aren’t 100% stain free, but they are WAY better. So baking soda and lemon is pretty effective at whitening stained nails. I’m going to try it one more time next time I take my polish off and see if I can get them back to mint condition.

So there we have it, both sorta work but lemon and baking soda is definitely more effective. Do you have any magic ways that you get stains off your nails? I’m still very open to suggestions.