In an attempt at being more like my lovely, crunchy, super eco-friendly best friend Shara, I let the Piggy Paint people send me a sample of their eco-friendly, pregnant friendly, ‘as natural as mud’ nail polish to use on my daughter. OK, and on myself as well. I dig cool nail polish; and the one they sent me was this uber cool glittery emerald green. I couldn’t resist.

When I opened the Piggy Paint press folder, I was shocked when a Styrofoam plate fell out. It had your regular, over the counter nail polishes polished, in dabs, on the plate. These traditional solvent-based, chemical-laden polishes burnt holes through the plate. Yikes.

Underneath the typical polishes with toxic ingredients, you had Piggy Paint, the water-based, non-toxic, eco-friendly sat quietly on the plate, no holes. Something in me hinted at a sigh of relief, but I wasn’t truly unsettled. How many years have I been painting my daughter’s nails with toxic polish? I never gave it a second thought.

This plate experiment was an accident that lent to the establishment of Piggy Paint. Melanie Hurley, a mom of two ‘fancy girls’ who love having their nails painted. Hurley had always hated the thought of her kids putting fingers, adorned with traditional kid-polishes, in their mouths. Not only did the ingestion of chemicals worry her, but also the smell nearly left her light-headed each time she painted two sets of fingernails and toenails.

I would like to give her a big shout out for making me look bad for never having thought of that.

“One day, my daughter dropped a glob of her solvent-based polish onto the foam plate we were working over,” recalls Hurley. “Shortly after, the paint had ‘eaten’ through the plate. From that day on, I decided that any flammable substance that could cause foam to disintegrate was unacceptable for children’s fingernails.”

The resulting polishes are proudly made in the U.S.A. with natural ingredients. They are non-flammable and contain no formaldehyde, toluene, phthalates, biphenyl A, ethyl acetate or acetone. And because they are hypoallergenic, everyone can enjoy them. You can find their products on their web site, or in stores like Walmart. Let me know what you think. My only disappointment is that it doesn't last as long as traditional, toxic polishes, but if you let them dry for one minute and then blow dry for a minute, it helps them last longer.

Have you heard about nail polish being toxic? Have you ever tried Piggy Paint or a similar, eco-friendly, non-toxic nail polish? Let us know what you think.

Read more by Jamie Tripp Utitus on living and loving with Multiple Sclerosis at

Ugly Like Me