day one hundred and twenty four, nailene white pen

hello from a suddenly snowy london!!! i know this is about nail polish...but we've had a sudden inundation of snow here in london and it's quite surprising and pleasant! so here is the view out of my bedroom window. not much for places that are accustomed to snow...but this is a lot for london!

today is a little different, a bit silly! nailene have a french nail white polish pen and i used it to paint my nails and use my konad plate to do proper cow spots. not really my most traditional polish post...but i couldn't let go of the idea once i thought of it!!!

day ninety three, nailene nail guides, opi rent, misa forbidden lust

okay. we're (i'm) oing to call this my hattrick post because it's 3 different products used at the same time...which is incredibly rare for me! this is going to be a really chatty post as i go through step-by-step how i did this and why i chose these products. if you aren't interested you can just skip to the pictures as they are pretty self-explanatory.



i follow a LOT of nail blogs and some are about people doing nail art...and they're incredibly talented and i wanted to try and do some cool coloured french tips like i see on them. the lovely people at nailene sent me nail guide stickers for french tips and i set to work!

let me state first and foremost...that i am TERRIBLE at nail guide placements. absolutely horrendous. it's shameful how bad i am. but i never do it so i have no experience. i started with my left hand (since i'm a righty), placed the guides and made sure i wrapped them as far around my finger as they would go (it makes a difference!) and put 2 thin coats of misa 'forbidden lust' as my coloured tips. you can't really get away with more than 2 coats. then you need to wait for it to dry (also make sure the guide is pressed on as tight as possible so no polish leaks under the sticker)

when removing the guides it is REALLY important to not pull up toward the polish or you will mess up your tip line and possibly pull off some polish. now i put the guides..way too far down on my left hand (and if i had more skill i would've used nail polish remover and a q-tip to make it less thick..but just getting this far was tough enough!).

i did a better job on my right hand because i knew i put the guides too low...but here they are a little too high on some nails (basically i just need to keep doing this until it becomes easy to see where to place them. however, it is hard for me because i have really shaky hands so getting the stickers on evenly was a big effort)...so i need to try again another time to put the guides where they belong.

i didn't want to just leave the coloured tips and put a topcoat on...i wanted something more. so i used 'rent' by opi (from the collection featuring la boheme). this is a pretty useless polish unless used like i did here. it's supposed to be some sort of pale colour with glitter but really it's mostly clear with very faint shimmer. so the fact that it is a boring...nothing colour and has very subtle shimmer worked in my favour. it added some depth and prettiness to the whole nail and gave off a glow for the part of the nail not tipped.


anyway...i really liked how this looked even though i know the tip placements weren't spectacular. i just have to keep trying i guess!! i promise i won't chat this much for awhile :D

day eighty, nailene couture safari

here's another set of fake nails from nailene. i really liked the design so i actually glued it to my fingers. it's a fun...zebra with sparkles and that is cool.

i tried to use as little glue as humanly possible but i still had places where the glue was visible and made weird marks. i like that they give you pink glue and the base is tinted pink so it can look more natural...even though it's obviously fake.

i still had issues with the length and couldn't find a single nail to adquately cover my thumb...and that was anoying. it was either huge and impractical or i had to only cover 3/4 of my nail instead of all of it.

i am writing this after i took them off, i put them on yesterday evening and one popped off when i was doing some housework earlier so i popped the rest off (using a wooden cuticle pusher instead of soaking my hands in acetone) and as predicted...i have glue and uneven bits all over my fingers. if there was a way to combat this...i'd probably be more into fake nails. but it BOTHERS me! it ruins my nails until the glue bits go away. no amount of aceton seems to fix it and i don't have a professional buffer tool to get the bits off.

so basically...the nails are nice....but i don't know that i'll be actually sticking any onto my fingers again.

day seventy nine, nailene so real flex fit french (medium length)

okay. so the lovely people at nailene sent me some fake nails and stuff to review for my blog. which is awesome...i love freebies! this set is the 'natural' or 'so real' set...it's a french (obviously) and it's supposed to be very thin and more real because it has little half moons for the bottom of your nails. i used to have really pronounced half moons when i was a kid..but the older i got the more they faded. i think they're only visible on my thumbs...i honestly don't know. i'll have to check!!

my HUGE gripe with these nails is that they only come with glue and no stickers. the stickers are adhesive and allow for more temporary wear. i didn't actually glue these on my fingers, i just rested them on so they might look a little weird. they sent me another pack that i am probably going to actually glue on. i WISH they had sticker adhesives since i always have bad luck with the glue and getting them off is a total pain.

my other gripe is that i have really short nail beds. i mean...REALLY short. the medium length nails tower above the end of my natural nail and then some. they're probably longer than the longest i've ever had my nails. so it kinda bothers me. i havne't tried the short length so i don't know. but the standard length for most fake nails is medium and it is always too big for my fingers.

so...these are nice..professional. i always find it hard to use my hands with fake nails and i find myself gripping things awkwardly but these are nice. a great way to get an easy french without the effort.