Recent NOTD: New Year's Refresh

You may recall the Incoco 2015 strips I wore leading up to New Year's Eve (from my NOTD catch up post):



Of course once it was 2016, I couldn't be going around with last year on my nails, yet I didn't have time to do a full mani change, so I transformed some of the gold strips by covering them with Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme and topping that with a gold and holo glitter from Bonita, Golden Girl, plus Diamond Dry top caot. This, my friends, is a lesson in warm gold versus cool gold.



Holo popping in direct light:



The sun actually came out for a while, too:





I did eventually take off this mani (foil method for the win, what with glitter on top of strips) and am now giving my nails a treatment week. I've been having good luck alternating Duri Rejuvacote with Qtica Nail Growth Stimulator. It was Duri's turn this time.



Hope 2016 is off to a good start for those of you reading!

Recent NOTD: Sally Hansen Salon Effects French Mani

As many times as I've worn Sally Hansen strips, I'd never tried the French Mani ones until earlier this month, when I put on the Pink Macaroon design.



The directions on the side of the box are a bit different for these than the regular designs. For the regular, the steps are peel, apply, shape; for these, they're apply tip, apply strip, shape. The contents differ, too; like the regular designs, these have an instruction sheet, file, pusher stick, and two packets of full nail strips, but they also have a packet of tip strips.



In the tip strips packet, there are eight strips, which would initially seem like not enough for ten fingers, but each of them has two sections, so there's really enough for sixteen fingers in eight sizes.





I put on a coat of Orly Nail Defense before I started with the strips. That's not exactly the clean, dry nails the instructions recommend, but I want the extra protection because my nails tend to be weak, and it doesn't seem to affect the wear I get from the strips. I then applied the tip strips, which work just like the full length ones as far as peeling off the clear plastic from the top and the strip from the paper backing before putting the adhesive backed strip on the nail. The only difference is these are just for the tips. The curve cut into them matched my natural smile line pretty well.



I realized too late that rather than matching the tip strips to my actual tips, I should have cheated the placement a bit and brought the strips a touch higher on all but my ring finger, since my ring finger has a longer free edge relative to the other fingers when they're all the same distance beyond the tip of my finger. Ah well, I'm probably more aware of that than anyone else looking at my fingers.



Just like doing a French mani with polish, after the tips comes topcoat, except in this case, the topcoat comes in strip form. The full length strips in the package were perfectly clear and applied right over the tip strips. I got a couple wrinkles in them, but that was obvious only in macro shots. I also noticed a few air bubbles, but was able to get rid of those by tucking each finger under my t-shirt and smooothing the strip down with my opposite thumb rubbing the fabric in circles over the nail.





I noticed that the glitter as portrayed on the box was not an exact match for the glitter on the tips. The glitter printed on the box was larger-grained and more holo than that in the actual strips. Not a huge deal unless you had you heart set on tips that looked just like the box.



With the extra layer of strip at the tip, this mani wore even better than I'm used to with the Salon Effects. Here's what my nails looked like after seven and a half days, five and a half of which I spent pounding a keyboard at work—there's barely any tipwear at all:





My only complaint about these is that if the tip strips weren't packaged all together, I could have gotten two manis from the box, as I only needed to use one packet of the clear strips (cutting them in half as per usual so I could cover two nails with one strip, though my nails are just about long enough that that barely works now). No matter how I wrap up unused strips, I've never had any luck using them later if more than a few days passes.

Oh, I do have one more complaint, and that has nothing to to with the strips themselves—they just seemed a bit boring to me since I'm not used to my nails looking so plain. Pink glitter tips? Yawn. I've come quite a long way from the woman who would only wear sheer peach polish to work way back in the day.

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.

Mystery Prism

Lextard's photo of Sally Hansen Metallic Magenta inspired me to add it to my wish list at MakeupAlley, as one of those "I don't think I'll get this but might as well put it out there" sort of items, since further research indicated it was a Canada exclusive and not very easy to find anymore. Well, one of the sweet Canadian ladies I'd swapped with before saw that on my list and said she had an unlabelled Prism that she thought might be Metallic Magenta and asked if I'd be interested. Oh yes, I would be. My end of the swap took its time getting to her, so the mystery Prism had to sit in quarantine for a while before I could swatch it, but finally the package made it through and I was able to take my new pretty for a test drive.









I can't say for sure if this is Metallic Magenta, but it could be. It's hot pink, and it's got multi-colored micro glitter. My photos don't match Lextard's, or this one by MollyHell, but that could be lighting differences or polish batch differences. Regardless, it's pretty, and I'm happy to have it in my collection.

*****

Astute readers will notice that I'm once again rockin' the shorties, thanks to my old nemesis, Mr. Peelies. For a few days, I turned to an old school bottle of Orly Nail Defense I'd saved from years back when it was my go to treatment base coat.



I probably should just lay off the color for a few weeks and focus on treatment, but that's so hard when there are so many things I want to wear.

Nearly Naked

I'm dealing with peelies again, so when it came time to change polish I took some length off my nails and put on Orly Nailtrition, applying on a new coat every day for three days, then skipped a day, then put another coat on. In the bottle it's a shimmery pink but on the nail it's pretty much clear. By the end of those five days, my nails did start to display a bit of a pearly pink glow.



It's too early to say if the Nailtrition did its job on the peelies—five days wasn't enough for them to all grow out—but I think my nails did look better when I took it off than when I put it on. The directions say to use it for two weeks, applying every day, then take a week off, but I don't have the attention span for that right now.

This picture shows one of the things that bothers me about my nails—if I file them so the same length of tip is showing on each, different amounts of the tips of my fingers show. My ring finger is nubbiny while the others are merely shorties. I'm guessing that I might be the only one who notices this, though—except now I've pointed it out to all of you.