Wrapping your tips: Do you?

I see it all over the place all the time: everyone says to wrap your tips. But do you do it every time you do a mani?

I used to. I was a tip wrapping fiend. I used to stare at pics on other blogs tying to see if everyone else wrapped their tips every time. If I chipped my tips, I would immediately fix it. It was just ingrained in me to wrap those suckers! However....and this is a big one, folks! Wrapping my tips caused a problem.

If you've read my blog for a while you already know that my nails do this weird thing where they randomly change shape. They can be perfectly shaped, then I polish and once my polish is dry, they are a completely different shape. The edges of my free edge would pull inward, making my nails look lopsided and uneven. Some days the curling would be so bad that I would lose it and take my length back down just to avoid dealing with it. And that killed me because I like to have some length to my nails. Nubbins are awesome, but I like to grow my nails out a bit. But with the weird wonky nail shape? Man, it just looked horrible. So I ended up filing almost daily in order to keep my nails from looking so goddamned weird.

I thought it may be my base coat. Negative. Does not matter what base coat I use. Polish? Nope. Every single brand, color, what have you. Maybe my nails are dry? I moisturize so often that it's scary. Maybe they're weak? Nope. I have strong, yet flexible nails. They have no issues with weakness, brittleness, peeling, etc. I have decent nails. Yet the problem still persisted.

I did notice that when I removed my polish, my nails would begin to bounce back to their normal shape. Hmmmmm. Then, a few days ago while filing, I noticed that once I filed away the tip wrap, my nails immediately went back to normal. WTF right?

I use Seche Vite. SV works like shiny shrink wrap. After some testing, I realized that my SV was essentially shrink wrapping my entire nail, and due to the wrapped tip it was actually pulling the edges of my nails inward, altering their appearance. Interesting, no? I don't know why I didn't think of that sooner, since I have always been aware of how SV tends to shrink up and act like shrink wrap.

So, I'm no longer wrapping my tips when I use SV. I just cannot stand the curling at the edges, and its so bad that a few of my nails actually have little bend marks in the center from the pulling inward at the edges. Having pretty tips just isn't worth wrecking my nails over. So, if you're offended by my lack of tip wrapping, I apologize. But my OCD will not allow me to have wonky nails. I'd rather have a little tip wear than agonize over the shape of my nails daily.

Have you ever had anything like this happen? What product has made your nails do strange things?