Watch Your Feet

One thing I love to do, especially in the summer, is have pedicures. There's nothing more girlie than looking down at your toes and seeing bright, shiny nail polished toes tucked into a sexy pair of sandals or flip flops. There's one thing you must be careful of if you decide to forego a home pedicure for a salon one.....bacteria! Having contracted a nail fungus on my big toe a few years back was nothing, if not extremely annoying. This fungus, which my doctor explained to me, was most probably contracted from a dirty foot spa at the nail salon. If these foot spas are not properly cleaned with a bleaching solution (and I'll explain what properly means in a bit), then the bacteria has no place to go, but right to the customer, which is something you didn't pay for. Worse yet, if you are having a pedicure after freshly shaving your legs, you may be putting yourself at risk for a worse infection. Bacteria can seep in through tiny abrasions on your legs that occur after shaving causing open, weeping sores that may take months to heal and leave you with scars that will last a lifetime. If you're not sure just how your nail salon cleans the foot spas, ask them. What they should tell you is that a bleaching solution is added to a full tub of water, running the jets for a few minutes to force the bleaching solution through the filter, killing any bacteria that is lingering there. They should also be willing to pull off the filter to show you that they remove it daily and scrub it with a brush and bleach to kill any stray bacteria. If they don't do that, then move on to another salon that follows these steps. Just spraying a foot spa with a cleaning solution, after the water has drained, and wiping it down, will not kill all the bacteria and, certainly will not have any impact on the filter. Even if they do all these things, don't shave your legs for a couple of days prior to a pedicure, just to be on the safe side. I know this is not the most pleasant subject, but knowledge is power, as they say.