I counted the other day and I have 29 shades of blue nail varnish. Someone once told me that they all look the same – and sadly, they are no longer with us, having succumbed to injuries sustained from industrial amounts of varnish (only joking – the BF was fine once we got him to A&E).

Only those with a trained eye, or rather a crazy female such as myself, could relate to the fact that, while nail polish may look "similar", the shades are NEVER the same.

We spend hours each week applying coat after coat – ridiculous if you think about it. Not the fact that ladies love colouring their nails with fluorescent paint then dabbing on glitter and small, plastic bows (what’s weird about that?), but because 90% of the time it is such a fruitless act.

You know what I’m talking about... uUnless you’re ambidextrous you usually end up with one hand looking like Michelangelo has graced it with a tiny brush, whereas the other was attacked by some deranged brute that went at you with a roller covered in varnish.

If you DO manage to get both hands looking fabulous (which usually involves wasting half your shopping budget), you can guarantee this will be short lived. All you have to do is cough or brush back a stray hair and your new varnish will instantly be covered in chips and scratches. What’s even stranger is that the four-year-old varnish on your toes could withstand a nuclear holocaust, despite doing the hokey-cokey with your work boots every morning. Somebody needs to call ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ or Dominic Littlewood at least.

I regularly have to deal with nail depression i.e. embarrassing paintwork, chips etc because, let’s face it, I’m poor. If I had enough money to waste then I’d go for the good old false nails, but personally I hate these. I can honestly say that I have never encountered a woman with falsies that are less that 18cm in length. FACT. How you ladies manage to go the bathroom on your own is beyond me. Yes, they look pretty and you can pick up pennies from the ground like a boss but surely there are downsides?

Yes. A BIG one. A girl I know ripped off her falsie (AND in turn the ‘real’ nail underneath) whilst trying to dress herself one morning. Now she is left with nine immaculately manicured nails and, as Mr Jelly from Psychoville would put it, a "red, raw stump". And let’s be honest-no one wants to eat a bacon buttie that a finger like that has been poking around in.

Oh the things we women do for just a fleeting moment of happiness.

Despite the fact that we know that our newly lacquered cuticles will soon meet their end, we persist with coat after coat of clumpy resin so that we can enjoy ‘perfect’ nails for the two minutes prior to chipping or falling off.

Saying that, I’ve been rocking some black nail varnish that has stayed on perfectly. I still don’t believe that jamming my hand in the car door was an accident but the BF assured me it was. Either way, it was the only way I was going to end up with the perfect manicure. Plus, he can blow on my toes to dry them when they need re-painted next year. See, men are useful sometimes…