Try Something Tuesday-Full Nail Water Decals: A Disasticure

~Before I begin I just want to wish Rara a very Happy Birthday, coz it's TODAY, Yay!~

PIC HEAVY POST

So the other night I went out to a comedy gig for Rara's birthday, and I wanted to co-ordinate my nails with what I was wearing-my beautiful black and white polkadot rockabilly style dress. I've done plain black and white spotted nails before and wanted something different so I chose some fun spotted full nail decals from YRNails which I thought would look pretty good. I watched their 'How To' video along with Lisa from Geordie Nails' tutorial video (which is really helpful if you've never applied full water decals before!) and got all my equipment ready to go. 

I started by painting my nails (badly) with two coats of Revlon-Black Star which is a lovely black with a silvery shimmer running through it to give a base colour if I needed one.

Then I set about applying my water decals and...here's where it all went wrong. Now I'm definitely not blaming the decals for this, I've seen lots of people use them well and get great results, I think it was my atrocious technique that was to blame for the mess they ended up in. 

Firstly, let me show you how they were supposed to look, with a little help from the lovely Wendy from Wendy's Delights:

Find her superior review of these decals here

I'm a bit ashamed of how badly mine do not look like the ones above really. Any how, here goes:

They don't look so bad from a distance do they?

Up close though you can see that I really did a terrible job!

And don't even get me started on my right hand!

I experienced SO many problems with these that I don't really know where to begin. I think my nails on my right hand were a little short (thanks to my Sheffield trip) because I struggled to get rid of the excess decal on my index and middle fingers simply due to how close to the ends of my fingers the nails are. Obviously I didn't cut them down as well as I could either, I didn't want to take too much of the widths so that I wouldn't end up with bald patches, but I should have been less cautious and they would have fitted my nails much better.

However even with the sizing difficulties I didn't manage to get these to stick to my nails at all. I followed all the directions to the letter, but they just sat on top of my nails and slid about no matter much I tried to get them to stay put by smoothing them into the corners. Even my right hand ring finger (which is probably the only one I cut to the correct size!) didn't stick down on its own, I ended up putting a layer of top coat underneath them all to hold them into place! I don't know what I was doing wrong. I also covered them in layers of topcoat, and they still lifted away from my nails.

As you can see only two of these are completely flush with
my nail! 

I ended up with lots of rough edges, lifting sections and creases and they just didn't look very nice. I went for a shower about an hour after putting these on and they all just lifted off so much that I just peeled them off in the end.

This happened just from picking up my towel! They all ended up
like this though =( =(

I'm really sad I wasn't able to make these work for me! I think they have the potential to look so amazing, and all the other blogs I've seen with people wearing them have been beautiful, I've never seen anyone else have this amount of problems. I am determined to try these again and get them to work, but maybe not for a while because I'm so disheartened by this first attempt =( I think next time I'll try them over naked nails to see if that helps, and obviously cut them down better.

In the end, because I was running out of time to get ready for the evening I ended up wearing something very simple (but lovely) over my Revlon base-two coats of Absolut Lacquer-Mrs Claus' Night Out. Although this is technically a Christmas polish, one of the reasons I bought it was because it had the potential to be used all year round, and I was right! These pictures were taken the day after so there's a bit of tip-wear but they're still in better condition than my decals were! I really like this combo =)

So there ends the sorry tale of my first attempt at full nail water decals. I hope you've at least enjoyed looking at my total failure, and if you have any hints or tips as to how I can make them work for me, please let me know in the comments!!

~Nail Art Novice~

Magic and Planets

So I lasted all of two days before I took off my magnetic mani from last time and gave in to the beauty that is L'Oreal-Magic Croisette. As I mentioned, it's a beautiful royal blue polish with goldy/greeny/aquay shimmer in (hard to tell the actual colour as it's constantly changing in different lights!) and frankly it looks pretty amazing on my nails. I'm a bit sad though that after two coats on my (tiny) toe nails and two coats on my fingers I've already used up a FIFTH of the teeny bottle. I reckon after this it's going to be a special occasion polish because it's too nice to use up too soon!
I added an accent nail of Emily de Molly's gorgeous When Planets Collide which I bought ages ago and for some reason I had never used on my fingers! It's a lovely glitter polish with blue, teal and orange glitters of various sizes in a dark navy/black base and I probably could have layered it up without the Magic Croisette underneath as it's turned out quite dark looking, although still lovely. (For better pictures go to the listing on Emily de Molly's Etsy page.)

Anyway, enough talking, on to the pictures-two coats of MC and three coats of WPC on my accent:

This one taken in natural light

Just look how pretty those glitters are!

Ooft. I love this. It's so shimmery and shiny and sparkly and all the colours in it look fab. I know the pictures don't do either of these polishes justice, but trust me, they both look amazing. I'm definitely in love, can someone just marry me to Magic Croisette please? You're going to be seeing more of this this week because I'm going to keep it on as long as I can, so will have to work around it tomorrow for Try Something Tuesday, but I'm sure I can think of something!

Until then,

~Nail Art Novice~

P.S I know these photos look messy but I just can't seem to clean them up any better! If anyone's got any advice for me as to how to get a neater clean up please let me know. At the moment I'm just using remover and a cotton bud and as you can see, it doesn't do the best job! Thanks =)

Help Needed!

I hadn't meant to post again so soon but I wanted to tap your imaginations for advice:

This happens to me ALL THE TIME and I wondered if any of you knew why it might be? (Please ignore the chip on my middle finger, I know exactly how that happened.). My index fingers on both hands often lose the whole nail of polish from seemingly harmless things like putting my hand through a sleeve. It's happened many many times with many different polishes (all with a base coat on underneath/top coat on top) and I wanted to know if it happens to anyone else and if there's anything I can do about it or if I just have to resign myself to that fact that I have extraordinarily slippery nails on just my index fingers?

Has this ever happened to you? Please give me some advice!

Thanks,

~N.A.N~