Ladies and Gentlemen, let me present you the long awaited nail post! WARNING: This is going to be HUGE!
We’re having a cozy warm weather, about 22 Celsius degrees in shade, so what better way is there to spend the day than blog on my dad’s computer on our patio? :'D Well, I can actually think of a couple of other things, but as I’ve spent the morning cleaning around the house I wanted to come outside. The heat wave is making me incredibly lazy, so I’ll just spend the afternoon taking photos of my nail stuff and blogging. :3
This post includes:
- My nail care equipment
- My nail care routine
- My nail polish collection
- My current nail situation
- A short how-to-repair-a-broken-nail tutorial
As I like to say, on with the show!
My nail care equipment
Here are all the things I use for my weekly nail care. I’ve got two files, a paper nail for shortening the nails and a glassy one for smoothing everything out. I put the clippers in the photo too, but I try to avoid using them as much as I can. It’s just when I need to shorten my nails for more than 4 mm that I use them. I’m slightly too impatient to file off half a centimetre of my nails. Then I’ve got an old Swisa Beauty buffer (that one I use only when necessary, not every week), and Hand & Body Lotion and Cuticle Oil from the same brand. There’s also a Mavala nail polish thinner for older, streaky nail polishes and a super glue for repairing any broken nails, but more about that later.
My nail routine
I usually do my nails only once a week, because I usually can’t find time to do them during the week or am just too lazy for that. In my opinion, Sundays are the best for doing nails, since I usually don’t really have anything else to do and might be a bit depressed for the upcoming Monday.
I usually start with picking up something to watch from our digibox, grab some cotton and my nail polish remover (which is missing from the photo, apparently. I usually use Lumene’s acetone-free nail polish remover) and obviously remove my old nail polish. For me it works best if I first just hold the remover-soaked cotton on my nail for a little while; that way the polish is much easier to remove.
After removing the old nail polish I usually use some basic body cream for my hands and them wash them with soap, because Lumene’s nail polish remover leaves my fingers sticky. After washing my hands I use the Swisa Beauty Cuticle Oil and Hand & Body Lotion and wait for some time before doing anything else. I guess I’m trying to let my nails rest for a while.
If I need to shorten my nails, I start with either clippers or a paper file, depending on how much I need to shorten them. I always finish with my glass file, since it’s the only thing that keeps my nails from chipping. I know that some people say it’s best to shape your nails with nail polish still on, but somehow I usually prefer to shape my nails when I can actually see everything about them. This is obviously a matter or preference. My nails always start to curl inwards from the sides when I have nail polish on, so shaping them is harder then.
When it comes to actually polishing the nails, I always start from the left hand’s thumb with a base coat and than go fro there on. OPI Natural Base Coat dries really fast, so I don’t really need to wait for the left hand to dry before continuing with the right one. After applying the base coat to both hands I do wait a while before starting with the actual coloured polish. My techniques are far from perfect, so I won’t go into much detail. I recommend reading this article by Michèle from LACQUERIZED. (And please do read her other articles, too!) Her blog is amazing. Every time I read one of her posts I end up wondering why I even bother with this blog of mine. She’s phenomenal and her nails are to die for. ♥ …Anyway, back to my nail polishing routine. I first polish my left hand’s nails, then wait, then polish the right hand’s nails, then wait some more, repeat the previous steps, wait again, then apply the top coat and after a minute or two apply OPI Drop Dry. After that I don’t need to wait for all that long for the polish to dry, but I do try to avoid any unnecessary contact on my nails for the rest of the evening. :'3 If I have the energy I’ll do some cleaning up around the nails. And that’s pretty much it for my nail routine!
My nail polish collection
The huge part starts here. :'D
First, here’s where I keep all my nail polishes:
An old box I’ve got as a Christmas present years ago. It’s just so cute, don’t you think? I can’t buy any new nail polishes though, if I want to keep them all in there…
Here’s how the contents of the box looked before last Christmas, compared to the current situation. I can’t stop wandering what the crap happened in these past six months. xD And my collection (36 polishes) isn’t even of a medium size compared to most nail bloggers out there. :3
And now on to the polishes!
Starting off with Mavalas. You can probably see the names on the bottles (apart from the Base Coat, which is hiding in the Black bottle, since it’s own bottle broke when mom tried to open it for me) but I’ll write the names here anyways. From left to right: French Cancan, New Delhi, Night Club, Silver, Gold, Top Coat, Base Coat. I have probably reviewed most of these here before, so I’ll just put this briefly. Mavalas are okay, in my opinion. Not great, but they serve their purpose well. I’ve heard many people complaining that Mavalas are too expensive, but I think their price is reasonable. They are not cheap by any means, even though that’s what my mind seems to think every time I see a colour I like. Usually people also complain about the short wear of Mavalas, but that’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with good base & top coat.
Next up are my L’Oréal and Lumene polishes. The four polishes from the left have gotten extremely streaky and I don’t use them all that much anymore. They were all very pretty, though, when they were still usable. The two polishes on the right are both in a perfect shape. The polishes are, from the left again, L’Oréal Star Magnet magnetic silver, L’Oréal Resist & Shine 540 (I couldn’t find any name for it), Lumene 512 Good Time, Lumene 15 Late Night, Lumene Natural Code 22 Classy and Lumene 534 Dancing Waves.
And here are some random polishes. GOSH 054 Steel, which I don’t like at all, colour wise, a red Aden Cosmetics polish I got from my mom but have never used (and I’ve never heard of this brand before, either o.O), Nivea colour mini 55 Black Sparkle (my Tooto nail polish ♥) and Chanel Blue Satin, which looks almost black and is a pain to apply.
And here are the essentials: OPI Drip Dry, Natural Base Coat and Top Coat. What would I do without these three? I can’t honestly say that these would be best products around, as I haven’t really tested too many of these, but at least these beat Mavala’s top & base coats.
Here are my China Glazes and two other GOSH polishes. Man, I love how my camera can’t get the colours right. CG’s Stroll and Ruby Pumps look quite right, but I can’t say the same about those two GOSHes. Well, they are Golden Dragon and Ocean, anyway. For these polishes, I wish CG would have bigger brushes on their polishes. The polishes could be slightly more opaque, too. The GOSH frosts could apply better, too.
Hey, look! Another example of almost accurate colours! Anyway, these are all OPIs (Oh really? Please don’t even start with stating the obvious. –.-''), Catch Me in Your Net, Yoga-ta Get This Blue, Ink, Sapphire in the Snow and Lady in Black. Nothing bad to say about these babies. All lovely colours. ♥
Last but not least, more OPIs! (What do you mean my favourite colours seem to be dark red and blue?) I’m Not Really A Waitress, O’Hare & Nails Look Great, DS Reflection, DS Extravagance and Sweet Heart. My INRAW has got slightly sticky. ;__; It’s probably time to use some of that thinner… O’Hare smells awful, as I mentioned in my last post, I just love the DS’s and Sweet Heart is a pain to apply, plus it chips off easily, even with base & top coat.
My current nail situation
As I told in my last post, I’ve shortened my nails for quite a bit. Honestly, now that I look a these, I think that’s a good thing. ^^
Ahem, so here are my nails, all natural and stained from three weeks of nonstop use of red polish and everything. :'3 I’m having a hard time deciding what colour to go for next. Something summer-appropriate, for sure. Plain white? Sparkling blue? Should I perhaps try to do some kind of a funky manicure? Gah, life’s so tough. ^__~
Anyway, I think (I might be just imagining things though) that my nail beds have grown slightly. Yayy! I have always had very round nail beds, so my nails look really small if they don’t have any length in them. Overall I am pretty happy with my nails at the moment, disincluding some chipping on a few nails and the obvious stains. I’m not a hundred percent sure about the shape, though… (I never am. :'D) My nails don’t seem to be co-operative when it comes to my desired shapes. I wish I could have those red old Hollywood oval-shaped nails… ;_;♥
How to repair a broken nail
Again, you would probably find a better tutorial from some proper nail blog (LACQUERIZED, I’m telling you!) but I’ll just briefly tell you about my method of quickly and easily repair a torn nail. I don’t take any credit for this, though, since I’m pretty much copying someone else’s idea. (Seriously people, Google is your friend. ^^)
Here’s where I’m starting from. My thumbnail is slightly torn from the left, just above the point where the nail bed ends. This is the most annoying way to break a nail, because you’d have to cut the whole nail off if you didn’t want to get it stuck to every possible piece of fabric or hair or whatever. The most simple way to go about this would be to just apply a small amount of super glue in the fracture, wait for it to dry and maybe carefully buff any excess glue off, but I decided to do a little extra.
Usually one would like to buy a special nail repairing kit for this, so one would get all the things needed for the repairing. I thought I’d save a few bucks by just using super glue and the things I already had at home. For this method, you’ll need:
- Super glue
- A piece of silk wrap, coffee-filter paper or tea bag paper
- Tweezers
- A toothpick
I started with making sure that my nail was totally clean and unpolished. Then I cut a small piece of coffee-filter paper, making sure it would cover the whole fracture. I applied a few drops of Super glue in the fracture and then a few drops on the coffee-filter and used the tweezers to place the paper on the fracture. Please notice that it’s probably better to use a quite thin paper for this. My coffee-filter was a bit too thick, so I wasn’t able to wrap it below my nail for some extra hold. (Also, the thicker paper showed through my nail polish.) Finally, I used a toothpick to make sure that the glue and paper dried evenly on my nail and waited a few minutes for the glue to dry completely. Afterwards I gently buffed the repaired part of the nail, to make sure everything was as smooth as possible and then just applied my nail polish as I normally would. The wrap stayed on for months and I didn’t have to worry about the fracture anymore.
Here are my fixed nails, thumb, index and middle finger. I guess I could have done better with these, but it was my first time. I managed to get a small fracture on the other side of my index finger too, and I’ve repaired it with just super glue this time. It seems to be working fine and is a lot more subtle than these wraps.
Gosh, was that all? I guess so. That was a handful to write. ^^ It’s past midnight already, so forgive me for not proofreading everything. I don’t even want to know what horrible typos might lurk in there, tiredness with the laptop keyboard isn’t a good combination at all. D:
I fail so much… Well, all comments are appreciated!
Until next time, dears!
♥ Hetha ♥
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