Good afternoon, Dear Reader!
I applied a set of Sally Hansen Salon Effects today, using Cut It Out, the black and white floral pattern. Real life is overloaded busy these days, so as the week wears on, I get more and more tired and do dumb things, and this application was riddled with dumb mistakes. For a reference point, my first try using them was with
Laced Up, and they came out close to perfect. Today, I was able to let go of the hope of perfection very early in in the process.
I've had the gold glitter nail polish strips on as a pedi since I made the first Salon Effecst Strips post, so ten days of wear. For a few days, one of them has shown a crack when waterlogged, but once it's dry the crack doesn't show. I was waiting for it to chip and finally decided if it hadn't by now, it wasn't going to and I removed it. The nice thing about the glitter strips is that they're smooth on the surface, not gravelly like glitter polish, and they removed as easily as the Laced Up strips did.
To start the application, I laid out all the strips from one of the two packets in the box and picked out the five for a manicure. My hope was to get a full mani and full pedi out of one packet after some of the Laced Up comment indicated that it was indeed possible on longer nails. When sizing them on my nails, it was clear that the length from the cuticle to the tip of my nails, down the center, was longer than one-half of one strip, so using only the five for a full mani wasn't an option for me. I trust that it's entirely possible for those who suggested it, so I'll have to give it another shot the next time I have a bad break. I applied a coat of nail strengthener to give the strips something to stick to, which may well be where my difficulties started.
Here's where the really dumb mistakes came in... I kept placing them really off center or too far from the cuticle so they looked grown out, and my left hand has only one nail without some sort of fix, my index finger. After the first error I removed the strip for a do-over, but it soon became clear that I'd run out of strips long before I had a finished mani if I kept doing that, so I started just fixing them and moving along. At the end I sealed them with top cat. I'll show you the picture first do you can look for the repairs while I tell you about them.
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips in Cut It Out |
The first two went unrepaired - my thumb strip is too far from my cuticle and the index has a wrinkle near the tip, but neither is visible enough to risk messing them up doing anything further to them. My middle nail was the one that showed me this wasn't going to be easy, and not because of the product. I laid a strip down maybe halfway up my nail, not even in the general neighborhood of my cuticle, and it's the one where I did a do-over. After the new coat of strengthener dried, I used the closest sized strip to the one I wrecked, which was a little big, and laid it down a few millimeters down the finger from my cuticle, but the overlap was only on the side on the left and along the left side of that nail since I laid it down completely off center again. At this point I was out of strips that would fit, so I used the little orange stick from the package to fix it. With the pointy end I made a dotted line between the excess and what was on my nail, and with the flat edge I scraped off the excess, and what remains along the edge there will come off in the shower in a bit. It's not perfect, but that worked quite well. My ring finger was another centering issue, so I cut off a rounded edge from the extra length of the strip used on that nail to fill in the side on the left in the picture. The pattern has a break in it at the overlap, but it's hard to see. My pinky, I laid it down way too far up the nail again, so didn't press the strip down but gently lifted it back up. Some of the strip stayed stuck on, so I smoothed that onto the nail, then turned the same strip around to use the other cuticle-shaped edge and just put it over the other, and it worked fine.
For the second hand, I was even more tired but also annoyed with myself so I wasn't thinking, and those look fine. One right-hand nail has a double layer resulting from falling short of the cuticle, but that was the only problem. Overthinking when I'm way too tired generally results in mistakes, and that's what happened here. I'm sure you get too tired to function well too, which is why I wanted to show you how nicely the strips took to tidying up errors.
I'd gone back and forth on doing the pedi through this, and finally guilted myself into doing it when I considered that the opened leftover strips would dry out and be useless, so if I ever wanted a Cut It Out pedi, I'd better get on with it. However, all that remained after my arduously complicated mani application were the two gargantuan strips and one super-skinny strip, and when I assessed that they'd be enough to cover all ten remaining nails only if I successfully cut out and applied a lot of little pieces, I threw in the towel and threw out the last three strips. A honest consideration of the outcome of it, in light of today's application skills, made it seem like I just skipped the steps where I cut out and fail at applying the pieces of strips and went directly to throwing them out.
That's my long story of applying the Cut It Out strips. It was a hassle, but looking at the outcome I'm very happy, and I cringe at the thought of what a Konad attempt would have resulted in today! Until next time, Dear Reader, love and nail polish to you!
All Rights Reserved, Siobhan@
The Nailphile. If you're reading this elsewhere, it's stolen from a real
nail polish blog.
