Recent NOTD: Nubbins and Art Club Glam Decals

The patch on my left middle finger that I'd been nursing along for quite a while in December finally got to annoy me so much that I just stopped replacing it and cut my nails down to nubbins and slapped some OPI Nail Envy Sensitive & Peeling on them. In my mind, nubbins are nails that are short enough to show fingertip skin. Some people's nails look great as nubbins; I don't think mine do, at least not when bare or nearly so, because if I make the free edges match in length, the skin part doesn't and vice versa and that mismatch bothers me. When my nails are longer, the difference seem less obvious. But sometimes it's necessary to just prune back a lot. Here's what they looked like just after the big cut:



A few days later, I was bored with all this plainness on my hands, so I pulled out some Art Club Glam nail decals I'd gotten a long time back but never used because they seemed so small compared to other strips I've tried. The design I tried was called Iridescent Mermaid, which has green, copper, and white scales on a clear background.



With my nails as short as they were, I had no trouble fitting the strips to length, but did have issues with width; some of my nails were just too wide for the widest strips left after I did my thumbs.



I could have overlooked the width issues. What I couldn't deal with was how thick these stickers felt; I had trouble getting them to lay down nicely (perhaps because I was putting them on over the Nail Envy instead of on bare nails, but I've put Sally Hansen strips over basecoat and had no issues). I didn't think the top coat sealer recommended by the directions would help, so I skipped that and wore these for just a few hours before peeling them off (which didn't seem to disturb my base coat, much less my nails underneath). It's too bad these didn't work out, as I liked the design and would have liked to experiment with using them over different base colors. At least they weren't expensive; I think I paid something around $2.50 for them on sale.

Ten days after the big clip, with the help of several refreshes of Nail Envy, my nubbins had grown out to shorties:



I may keep them on the short side through the winter, when I'm jamming my hands into gloves pretty much every day.