My wife got a fill of her acrylic nails yesterday, and it looks like one of her fingers was injured. Her left pinky, FWIW. The cosmetologist uses a Dremel to grind away unwanted material, possibly even what she considers to be calluses (there’s a callus-like growth under my wife’s nail; maybe it’s more accurate to call it a wart-like growth).
Anyway, at one point, toward the end of the session, the cosmetologist said, “I’m going to put this on you so it will stop the hurting.” Then she daubed something onto the tip of my wife’s finger, and it started to BURN. When I saw it for the first time, I could see a red mark where the growth had apparently been abraded; it looked to my untrained eye as though a “cap” of cyanoacrylate had been applied, perhaps to stop the bleeding. Foolishly, I suppose, I accepted the cosmetologist’s assurances that the pain would go away soon, then I paid up and took my wife to lunch.
By the time we were finished with lunch, the tip of the finger was still hurting, AND a thick blister was forming on the back of the second knuckle that finger, accompanied by swelling, but not redness. When I came home from work this morning, her whole pinky finger felt like it was burning up, and was swollen and stiff. The pain was so intense that her entire hand was trembling.
This evening, I applied some polysporin ointment to the finger to ward off infection and perhaps provide a little relief. It didn’t, so an hour later, I applied a generic antifungal cream to the finger (because it did somewhat resemble a fungal infection). That appears to be providing significant relief of the pain. Also, the swelling on her knuckle has gone down enough that I can see a very small patch of rawness toward the center.
My question is, WHAT could the cosmetologist have in her toolkit that a) she would think of as a good topical treatment for a skin abrasion, and b) could a drop of such a substance, inadvertently applied to the skin of the knuckle, possibly cause a chemical burn of some sort that would give rise to the lesion on the back of her finger?
Any experts in acrylic nails here who can describe the filling process, and the tools and materials used?
Thanks very much for any education you can provide to us.
