Bleaching Your Toes Is Bad. Bleaching toes is something that people have tried to eliminate fungal infections from their toenails. Toenail fungus is an infectious condition that can often be hard to live with. The aesthetic changes that nail fungus can cause can be unsettling and embarrassing. Often, people may feel like the nail fungus is an indication of poor health in another way. Treatments available for toenail fungus are often ineffective, unsafe, and expensive. Because of this, sometimes people resort to treatments that they find online. 

Review your sources

Bleaching toenail fungus away is a prime example of why everything on the internet shouldn’t be trusted. None of the people suggesting this treatment are licensed professionals. In fact, medical professionals strongly advise AGAINST using bleach anywhere on your skin at all. This is because bleach is dangerous and ineffective at treating fungal infections. When finding information about toenail fungus online, make sure you are looking for sources that are trustworthy. Vetting your sources to only include podiatry clinics is the best way to ensure you are getting the correct information about the condition. This can help you avoid making dangerous and unsafe decisions like putting bleach on your toes.

Safety issues regarding using bleach on skin and nails

Bleaching your toenails is unsafe because of the properties of chemical bleach. This is a cleaning product that is only meant to be used on surfaces like bathrooms. Importantly, bleach shouldn’t be used anywhere where it could come into contact with the skin. When bleaching clothes, for example, the clothes need to be washed thoroughly to remove the bleach before wearing them. Chemical bleach is an intense, potent chemical that has very strong properties. Bleach can rapidly corrode materials like some plastics and completely removes the dye from clothing. Because you don’t want your skin to corrode or become colorless, using bleach is a bad idea.

Effects of bleach and why Bleaching Your Toes Is Bad

The real effects of bleaching skin are severe. Therefore Bleaching Your Toes Is Bad. Often, using undiluted or diluted bleach on the skin can cause chemical burns and irritation of the skin. Chemical burns can cause symptoms like redness, blistering, peeling, cracking, and more. Often, chemical burns require immediate medical attention. It is best to avoid them as much as possible by avoiding using harsh chemicals on the toe. 

If you have tried bleaching your toenails, you should seek professional medical assistance immediately. Wash off the bleach from your toe and assess the damage. If you just have slight irritation of the skin, you can wait to see if it gets worse before seeking medical attention. However, if you notice any more severe symptoms of a chemical burn, you should go to the emergency room or urgent care. 

Will Bleach kill fungus?

The other downside of bleaching toenail fungus is that it is actually very ineffective at treating the fungal spores themselves. Toenail fungus lives underneath the nail inside of the nail bed. To be an effective treatment for fungus, it needs to get through the nail into the nail bed. Different methods of toenail fungus treatment do this in different ways. For example, topical medications have chemicals designed to penetrate the nail.

Oral medications avoid going through the nail entirely by traveling through the bloodstream first. However, this requires them to be processed in the liver, which can have harmful side effects. Laser treatments penetrate the nail with heat to kill the fungus. Bleach tries to mimic a topical medication in its delivery method but is ineffective at getting into the nail bed. Also, despite how harsh the bleaching chemical is itself, it is not effective at killing fungal spores. Therefore, by applying bleach to the toenail you are doing a lot of harm, with not a lot of good. 

Nail fungus treatment

The good news is that there are treatments available for toenail fungus that are much safer than bleach. For example, the PinPointe laser is the most effective treatment available for toenail fungus. This laser has no side effects, which is a huge benefit when compared to bleaching and oral medications. Additionally, this laser is FDA-approved, which means that it is a tested, proven remedy for toenail fungus. This is a huge difference from bleach, whose off-label use for toenail fungus treatment is very ill-advised.

The PinPointe laser penetrates through the nail into the nail bed to kill the fungus without harming any of the skin of the toe at all and leaves the nail intact. It is best when performed by a licensed podiatrist since they are doctors who specialize in treating the foot and ankle. You can schedule an appointment for a consultation with one of our licensed podiatrists at 1-(800) 672-0625. To learn more about the laser itself and how it works, you can also visit our website for more information.