Turning demure paws into femme fatale claws with your friends at Vaseline

So, I’m gross. I rubbed my arm today and sent a small flurry of dead skin cells drifting across my desk. Yuck, right? Why am I sharing this? I don’t know, I guess I haven’t read anything interesting lately.

I posted once about how dry and flaky I am, which, troublingly enough, has been the most influential move of my blogging career (two Carmex purchases at press time — they should put me on payroll). So in the interest of continuing my Fannie Mae-esque sway over the personal care market, I’ll recommend another holy grail purchase for lizard people like myself and send those granola-munching assholes at Aveeno into a tailspin. Yeah, that’s right, Aveenists. I’m coming for you.

To begin, I’m a recovering nail-biter, proud to say that I can now regularly open soda cans and scratch bug bites. Of course sometimes I slip up and go on a bender, shredding the hell out of them in moments of extreme boredom or nervousness. As a result, my nails are almost always pretty weak and thin, no matter their length, prone to bending or chipping. This gets exacerbated in wintry conditions, forcing me to clip them (or, more often than not, bite them), which makes my already small fingers look like little cocktail weenies. Also, my hands are always cracking no matter the weather.

In conclusion, I don’t know how I’ve managed to date. But all is not lost for me, for, lo, I have Vaseline Healthy Hand and Nail Conditioning Hand lotion with Keratin and Vitamin E.

Don’t be deterred by the Vaseline label! It’s not uncanny and weird like Vaseline’s flagship product, the tub of 100% petroleum jelly, which has no defining purpose but is somehow always there, lurking inconspicuously on the bureaus and in the medicine cabinets of America. This stuff has a purpose, and that purpose is one of its primary ingredients: keratin. What is keratin? Wikipedia says,

Keratins are a family of fibrous structural proteins; tough and insoluble, they form the hard but nonmineralized structures found in reptiles, birds, amphibians and mammals. They are rivaled as biological materials in toughness only by chitin.

In other news, using this lotion is the equivalent of slathering Teflon all over your fingernails. And it shows, especially in the nails. When I use this stuff regularly, my fingernails grow faster and are considerably stronger — strong enough that I am actually deterred from biting them because I am intimidated. And it makes your hands super smooth, too — probably a result of the Vitamin E, which is way less cool. Despite their creepster status, the folks at Vaseline know how to make a good hand lotion. This stuff is the bomb dot com and I definitely recommend picking it up the next time you’re looking to waste a little money in the personal care aisle.