Frequent manicures can damage DNA in hands

Over­ex­po­sure to ultra­vi­o­let (UV) light is known to cause skin can­cer, but lit­tle research has been done into the safe­ty of the lamps used to dry nail pol­ish in beau­ty salons.

Now, a new study by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh (USA) reveals wor­ry­ing signs about the dam­age this radi­a­tion source can do to our hands.

LED nail pol­ish dry­ers are like lit­tle tan­ning machines for your hands. Depend­ing on the type of nail pol­ish, UV rays can be used to cure and dry quick­ly and cleanly.

Although the bulbs of LED nail pol­ish dry­ers are less intense than tan­ning beds and have a dif­fer­ent UV spec­trum, the small amount of light emit­ted still eas­i­ly pen­e­trates the skin with unknown consequences.

Pre­vi­ous stud­ies have sug­gest­ed lit­tle link between nail dry­ers and skin can­cer, but new research on the mol­e­c­u­lar side of the equa­tion is worrying.

Before the study, bio­engi­neer and lead author Lud­mil Alexan­drov said, “We did­n’t have a mol­e­c­u­lar under­stand­ing of what these devices would do to human cells.”

The results of this exper­i­ment sug­gest that UV light from nail lamps sim­i­lar­ly dam­ages DNA in human and mouse cells.

Petri dish­es con­tain­ing human and mouse cells were placed in a man­i­cure dry­er and used twice for 20 min­utes (with an hour break in between), result­ing in 20–30% cell death.

On the oth­er hand, 20 min­utes of irra­di­a­tion per day for 3 days killed up to 70% of the irra­di­at­ed cells. In one man­i­cure, the fin­gers are exposed to UV light for a total of about 10 min­utes. By com­par­i­son, the expo­sure in the cur­rent study was extreme.

Cells that remained after full-time irra­di­a­tion showed signs of DNA dam­age and muta­tions that lead to skin cancer.

Although these results do not direct­ly indi­cate an increased can­cer risk, they do sug­gest that a sub­stan­tial lev­el of risk may exist. It is not yet pos­si­ble to deter­mine exact­ly how often it is dan­ger­ous to go to a nail salon.

Alexan­drov and col­leagues call for suf­fi­cient long-term epi­demi­o­log­i­cal stud­ies to assess whether the mech­a­nisms revealed in this study lead to real harm.

The results were so alarm­ing for Maria Zivagui, a mem­ber of Alek­san­drov’s lab and lead author of the study, that she decid­ed to ditch the usu­al gel pol­ish manicure.