Stronger nails in 10 days – Dr Tom
Want to trade manicure-damaged, brittle nails for a strong set in just 10 days? This is Dr Tom’s backed-by-science story.
In the 1990s, Tom Cawood was a typical teenager, with a passion for guitars, rugby, beer, and trout fishing. Fast forward 30 years and Tom, now a senior physician at Christchurch Hospital, has developed revolutionary nail-strengthening products. What inspired him? His own brittle nail frustrations.
As a young classical guitarist and rugby player, Tom would use layers of superglue and tissue paper to protect his nails before a concert. This weakened and wrecked his nails, not only the glue but also the acetone to remove it.
Life went on though, and work and family took over. His guitar was put to one side until a few years ago when Tom suffered a major stroke and required open heart surgery to fix a congenital aortic valve problem.
In recovery, as a way to rehabilitate his brain, Tom picked up his guitar again. However, his nail annoyance soon resurfaced. He was forced into hiatus every time he broke one of his fragile nails. Fed up, he tried the available nail-strengthening products. Dissatisfied with the results, and armed with some ideas, he was awarded a Callaghan Innovation grant and teamed up with Lincoln University to develop a solution backed by science.
The team got to work, and managed a world-first by making giant fingernails from sheep wool (nails are also made of keratin) so that they could test their products in the lab.
After rigorous testing, Tom found that a special type of hydrolysed keratin from sheep’s wool was most effective, which he incorporated into his namesake nail strength cream and intensive care liquid. Studies proved that the biodegradable and environmentally-friendly products made lab nails 78% stronger after just two weeks.
For consumer testing, he gave the cream to classical guitarists (who really know about their fingernails) as well as many others, including a local hairdresser, and a surgical theatre nurse – 95% of them found it effective or very effective. Now, the doctor is taking his innovation to the world, with hopes of global sales to help fund his other passion projects.
A lover of trout fishing, his ultimate goal is to raise enough money from the nail products to fund research into eradicating the scourge of didymo from New Zealand’s rivers. Also called ‘rock snot’, didymo is an invasive freshwater algae that is smothering more than 200 South Island rivers and negatively impacting the river ecosystem and its biodiversity.
