Vanity's kisses: Spring nails

You know I’m crazy about spring and I want to celebrate it with colorful clothes, proper beauty products and, of course, new manicure that reminds me of spring.

So I decided to make some gel nails decorated with water decals technique.

Those are the things I used for my nails:

-nail polish remover with a cotton pad

-nail file and buffer

-cuticle remover (that metal stick)

-nail wipes

-nail primer and bonder

-clear tips, nail glue, nail trimmer, construction gel and a flat brush

-nude nail polish

-a cup with water (at room temperature), scissor, tweezers and a paper napkin

-top coat

-cuticle oil

Let’s get started! ;)

You can see my nails are pretty dull, short and painted with purple nail polish...just boring!

I started by removing the nail polish.

Then I gently pushed back my cuticles and I cut them using a regular nail scissor.

I know many won’t agree with cutting the cuticles, but this is how I like to do it (and I can tell you I don’t harm my nails by any means).

Next I filed my nails (taking care of the edges!) and I used buffer gently for my nail surface. After I filed all my nails , I took a nail wipe and I cleaned off the nail dust.

Now I was prepared to select and glue on the tips.

I’ve started by selecting the tips that matched with my fingernails size and then I glued them on to my nails.

When I had all the tips on I looked like a crazy cat! :D

Now for the part I hated the most! It was time to cut and file the tips. Such a boring work...and was a lot of work.

Fun fact: this is how much I had cutted of the tips

I also filed the surface of the tips until I couldn’t felt the transition between my natural nails and the tips.

I wiped the dust again, I applied the primer (not touching my cuticles) and then the bonder.

BE CAREFULL TO NOT TOUCH YOUR CUTTICLES WITH PRIMER! If you have any skin lesions and you put primer on it will burn like hell for a couple of seconds!

Now for the fun part: applying the gel.

I used three layers: the first one only on my natural nail surface and with the other two I created a bridge between my nail and the tip.

I cured every layer for two minutes using my UV lamp.

After all my fingernails were covered in gel I wiped off the sticky layer (and I looked over to see if there were any gel bumps to file off-luckily there weren’t ) and I painted every nail with two layers of nude polish.

Finally, the water decal technique!

I cut the foil with nail designs one by one (trying to match my nail size with the foil) and then I put the foils (one at the time) into the water and waited for about 20 sec (I counted :P).

Then I took the foil, wipe out the exces water using a paper napkin, gently pull off the design with my fingers and place it on the selected nail and I added my favorite top coat on!