Dashing Diva Press-On Nails Review

I mentioned last time that I wasn't back into my normal routine after vacation, and I'm still not. We hosted family for the long Labor Day weekend, which meant switching the house over to guest mode (we have a small space, so when it's just the two of us, I take over one of the guest bedrooms for my office, and the guest bathroom for the purpose of having my own sink to get ready for the day and get ready for bed). Then we had several days of enjoying the season-ending festival on the mountain with our guests, and now I'm in the process of settling the house back into normal living mode, which I will probably manage just in time to pack for my next trip. It's a fun life, but much less structured than I got used to all the years I was working.

With all the travel and such, I've continued to turn to fake nails because they're easy and keep my natural nails underneath protected. Recently, I tried a new-to-me brand, the Dashing Diva Magic Press nails I'd first seen at Sally Beauty back in April. The set I chose was called Ice Queen, and had light blue "creme" nails with faceted iridescent white accent nails.



The package (a hard plastic hinged case, and quite sturdy) had 30 nails (six of which were accent nails) in a variety of sizes, instructions, a prep pad (which smelled like it was just alcohol), a small stubby emery board, and a nail stick. The nails are pre-glued, so there are no separate adhesive tabs to deal with, and they have a peel-off layer over the sticky part with a tab at the nail base end, so it's easy to try them on for size without risking messing up the sticky bits.



These were easy to work with and fit my fingers pretty well. They don't have as deep a base curve as my natural nails (understandbly, as if they did they would squeeze most people's fingers), so the tips look wide to me, but I got used to them.



The faceted nail was fascinating to look at and feel the texture of. Sure, it looked fake, as natural nails don't make those shapes, but I didn't care. Here they are in natural light in the car the day after I put them on:



The box touted the "MEGA HOLD" adhesive and touted "Wear Up to 7 Days". On day 4, I had one nail pop off. Now, this was probably my fault for not using the prep pad on bare nails as per the directions, but I do not like to put glue/adhesive on my bare nails, so I always lay down a treatment coat first. I used that same treatment (in this case, it was the clear shade of Essie TLC) to re-glue the nail; it works surprisingly well and I feel it's less harsh than nail glue.

Here are the nails on Day 5 of wear; as you can see from these photos in different lights, sometimes the blue looked lilac or lavender, which was fine by me:



I ended up wearing these 12 days in all, reattaching them as they popped off (most actually stayed on the whole time). Here they are just before I took them off (which was easy enough to do by gently disloding them with the curved end of a metal cuticle pusher):



They held up pretty darn well. The "creme" ones didn't look worn at all; the color goes all the way through the nail, and there's no coating that wore off. The accent nail did suffer some wear, as the iridescence is a coating, and it wore along the raised lines of the facets and started to peel off the tip of the accent nail on my dominant hand, which admittedly I use as a tool sometimes. Still, given how long I wore these, I was impressed.