Dancing With The Stars’ Emma Slater Reveals ‘Painful’ Toenail Injury Sustained in Rehearsals

Dancing With the Stars isn’t a competition for the faint of heart — as dance pro Emma Slater can attest to!

Posting a video via her Instagram on Thursday, September 17, Slater, 37, revealed she had suffered a gruelling injury during rehearsal for the show.

Slater warned in text overlaid on the video: “Don’t watch if you squirm easy!” She then showed her followers her detached toenail.

“There’s a lot of people that want to do Dancing With the Stars, and they want to experience it, but there’s something you should know,” Slater said in the clip. “If you do Dancing With the Stars, this could happen.”

Slater continued, “Do you know what this is? This is my toenail. It’s not a fake toenail. This is my actual toenail, and I had to peel that off just now because it was flip-flopping like a cat door.”

The dance pro then joked, “You can imagine what my toe looks like without this being on it. It’s not cute.”

Slater confirmed the injury was as gnarly as it looked, captioning the post, “Yup! This one was painful 😣”

Followers flocked to the comments section to share their sympathies, including one who wrote, “Emma, I felt that pain through the screen 😭😂.”

Meanwhile, Alyson Hannigan, who competed on Dancing With the Stars’ Season 32 in 2023, shared that she had suffered a similar ordeal in the past. She wrote, “It happened to me! 😣”

Slater, who is paired with Savannah Bananas’ Jackson Olson for this year’s Season 35, previously told Us that they are going all in for the competition.

“It sounds really cliché, but I feel like we both feel the same in that we feel like we are going to be the people that we are going to focus on the most. Meaning like, we are our own biggest competition,” Slater exclusively told Us on September 2. “It just so happens that I feel like we both have the same mentality. We’re not really looking at anybody else.”

Although she’s keeping her eye on the prize and trying not to get distracted by the other teams, Slater said there were a few celebrities that could give them a run for their money in the ballroom.

“I mean, Jenna Dewan. I think Harry Shum Jr. is going to be amazing. I think Tatyana [Ali] is going to be amazing. I cannot wait,” Slater told Us. “I’m excited to see Hailey [Bills] and Sarah Jane [Nader] dance together. That’s going to be really cool, too. [There] could be a lot of people. Taylor Hanson. It’s going to be good.”