Late last week I found a set of Dashing Diva Gloss Gel Nail Strips when I was looking for a new set of fake nails to put on (yes, the organization of my nail stuff is an ongoing issue). I'd had a few too many nails pop off from set I was wearing so thought why not try the strips. Those aren't going to end up on the floor of someone else's house the way my fake nails had the other week (twice at the same party, even). I put them on late at night at home, so please forgive the wonky lighting in these next several pics. This set is called Gleam Queen and has mostly lilac creme strips, with three different accent options: purpley pink microglitter, silver microglitter, and lilac and pink "stained glass" with white leading.
The directions for applying these are similar to my beloved and long discontinued Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail polish strips: prep the nail, choose a size, smooth from base to tip when applying, file off excess. Removal is different: these can be peeled off rather than needing nail polish remover.
I did lilac on most of my nails, with silver glitter as an accent on my ring finger. In comparison to the nail polish strips, these are thicker, feeling sort of rubbery. That's good in that it makes them easier to handle: they don't tear or flop over onto themselves the way the very thin polish strips can. That's bad in that it's harder to smooth them out at the edges (my pronouced C-curve makes that harder) and harder to remove the excess at the tip (forget about the sides ... you can't cut these with the sharp end of manicure stick like you can regular polish strips). You can see some little wrinkles on a couple of my nails and some fuzziness at the ends where I had trouble filing them smoooth. The set does come with a fairly good sized one-sided file to use, but I still had trouble. The glitter strips were thicker than the plain ones, which meant they looked better since they didn't form those wrinkles at the sides and camoflauged irregularities in my nails better than the plain strips.
In the light of day the next morning, I wasn't super happy with how the plain strips looked, what with the wrinkles and the showing of every ridge underneath. The ridges aren't so obvious in this photo as they were to the naked eye. I also noticed some "fuzzies" stuck on the ends of some nails, likely clinging to the adhesive on the bits of strips I'd struggled to file off the night before.
Since I liked the glitter nail, I decided to just put accent strips over the plain strips. Much better.
There weren't any thumb-sized accent strips, so I just laid one of the stained glass ones down the center, hoping that would distract from the wrinkles at the sides. It looked pretty good, I thought.
I've now had them on for six days. There's been some slight lifting of the strips at the tips and corners of a few of my nails, perhaps because of the double thickness. The stained glass ones on my middle fingers are showing the most raggedy-ness, probably because I tend to bump those fingers into things more since they're longest.
I'd use these again, just stick to glitter sets rather than plain ones, or do a ridge filling base coat first, though I don't know how that would affect their sticking power.