As part of my NY resolutions, I decided to try and make more effort with my nails as I read so many amazing posts about the fantastically creative things people do with their nails that I thought it’d be fun to get in on that. However, the significant flaw in my plan is that I seriously cannot paint my own nails for love nor money.
I don’t know why, but I’m just inept in the art of nail painting and this was proved in my first real attempt at an ‘arty’ manicure: I bought a couple of gorgeous Essie nail colours in pale pink and grey and I planned to start simply by doing a full nail of pale pink and then painting one side grey. Nothing too extreme, just a bit of a fun with a couple of nice colours. But no! I couldn’t even get the first layer of pink right. So then, I decided to try a different pink (if in doubt, blame the varnish) but no! I couldn’t get that right either so it’s safe to say I’m just rubbish at nail painting. I’ve come to terms with it, it’s time you did too.
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| I used some rose balm on my cuticles which you can still see in this picture. |
So this brings me on to my first experience of nail wraps. I’ve got a couple of packets hanging around from various promotions and beauty boxes and I’d always looked upon them as things that I could only imagine I’d fail miserably at. However, after the miserably failed attempt at a manicure, I felt I had nothing to lose.
So I cracked on with the application and all you need to do is paint my nails with a clear varnish, let it dry, figure out the right size of each wrap so that it fits well with your own nail, remove it from the packet, stick it on, smooth it down and then file away the edge of it so there’s no overhang left. Then you add another coat of clear varnish to set the wrap in place. When you smooth it down, if it wrinkles at all you can lift it and re-smooth it, so it’s pretty foolproof. I was so surprised by how easy it was to do and the effect looks really fantastic. I’ve zoomed in with the pictures so you can see there are a couple of creases where I didn’t bother to smooth them down properly. They’re not that noticeable, but that’s probably due to them merging in with the pattern.
I’ve had these on for about 3 days and they still look really neat. I can feel a couple of bumps under the wraps, but I think that’s more due to my laziness (you have the option to lift and re-smooth as mentioned above, but I had hit my arty nail limit by this point) than the quality of the product.
There’s definitely enough in the pack for another application, but I’m not sure I’d get more than two applications out of one pack as I have quite wide nails and ended up using the larger stickers, but I think someone with smaller nails could get more than two applications from one pack.
I’m a total nail wrap convert and will happily be purchasing more and giving up on nail painting for the time being.
The wraps I used in these pictures are Nail Couture LA in Secession Kicks which are available here. I’m not too sure on the availability of this particular brand, but I believe they are landing at Harvey Nichols (if they haven’t already) soon.
