Friday, July 06, 2012

Gelish Manicure: Undone

I decided to remove the gelish finger nails on Tuesday and replace them with some patriotic nail art instead.

Here is how you remove gelish nails:

Method 1: Soak a cotton ball in nail polish remover, hold it on your nail, then wrap the whole thing in foil and wait ten minutes.  I did it this way over the weekend to remove a troublesome peeling thumb nail.  Works well, though I can't imagine doing all ten fingers this way.  Once you foiled one hand, you would never have the dexterity left to foil the other hand... right?  (Umm... yes, I realize I probably put way too much foil on that finger, but whatever).


Method 2:  I bought these nifty finger wraps that look sort of like bandaids - they have a pad that you soak in nail polish remover and the wrappy part is made out of that medical tape material that doesn't stick to anything but itself.  These worked well, and I was able to do both hands at one time, so I think it was worth the expense.  The only down side is that it didn't soak the tips of my nails very well and I ended up having to scrape the polish off those parts.  I think this may be operator error.  Next time I will wrap them over the tips more.  If if still have the problem, I may need to to resort to doing one hand at a time with the foil method.

So, after I removed the nails, I did a coat of the gelish foundation and two coats of the top coat, with no color in between.  This gave me a really good foundation for my nail art, featured below.

I'm taking the flags off tonight and I will paint them a different color, but this shouldn't effect the gelish foundation underneath.  I'm curious to see how long it will last??  (And will I leave it on long enough to find out, or will I redo everything once again??)

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Gelish Manicure: Day Five

It's been five days and the gelish manicure is holding up well. In fact, it has proven to be nearly indestructible, with just a few exceptions:

1. It cannot withstand nail biting... but, it makes nail biting significantly harder so hopefully it will help me break that nasty habit.

 2. It cannot withstand actively trying to scrape it off. (I got mod podge on my nails on Saturday and was trying to scrape the dried podge off my thumb and ended up popping the nail right off!)

 3. A couple of nails are starting to peel up on the edges where the gelish "bonded" to the skin surrounding my nail instead of the nail itself.

So, right now there are three nails that need to be redone (the bitten nail and two peely nails). I plan to redo those tonight, but I'm tempted to remove the whole manicure and paint my nails red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July tomorrow. Or, I could potentially do another gelish mani with the lighter color nail polish I bought and then go red, white, and blue on top. (Or, I wonder if I could do clear nails with just the foundation gel and top coat??) I'm hesitant to take off the polish early because I really wanted to give it a full two-week test drive. I guess I have all day to make the decision. Yes, ALL DAY. The day is going by s-l-o-w-l-y.