Rick Holloway

Contributor at Clear Nail Test

About

Warehouse shift supervisor, Tucker, Georgia. Forty-four years old. For five years I wore steel-toe boots every shift and kept socks on everywhere else because three toenails had gone thick and yellowish and I wasn't dealing with it. Not at pool parties. Not at the beach in June. Not in the locker room at the gym where I spotted Benny Kowalski at the squat rack on weekday mornings.

My wife scheduled the podiatrist appointment. He prescribed a topical antifungal, twice a day, applied with the brush in the cap. I used it for four months and took photos every Sunday, phone propped against the bathroom mirror in the morning light, dates and observations going into a spiral pocket notebook kept on the kitchen windowsill. Nothing changed in those photos. The color stayed the same. The edge where the clipper always caught stayed the same.

That four-month failure is what sent me to supplements. Bought the first one, started a fresh section in the notebook, kept the Sunday photo schedule. Ninety days: nothing visible. Bought another. Two years in, I'm on my third notebook and have tested over a dozen products, one at a time, each running the full 90-day window before anything got written up.

Dwayne Tillery, the forklift lead on the night shift, asked me early on why I was doing it one at a time instead of finding the best-reviewed option and going all in. The answer was simple: I had already bought one thing on someone else's word and photographed nothing changing for four months. Not going to repeat that without my own data.

The notebook and the Sunday photos are my credentials here, not a medical license. For clinical judgment about what's actually happening with your specific nails, a podiatrist or dermatologist is the right call. What I can offer is two years of dated photos and notebook entries across a dozen products, with clear records of what changed and when, and what showed nothing at all.

Posts by Rick Holloway

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