October 18, 2012

Whit's Tips: Cheap and Perfect French Manicure!



Posted by Ethne~

I always keep polish on my nails.  I just think it looks nice.  For how many zillion times I look down at my hands over the course of a day, I may as well appreciate what I see.

For a while I went to a salon to get French manicure gel polish put on.  The cost every 2-3 weeks started to add up, though, so I decided to go back to my own perfectly-acceptable polishing skills with the gallons of high quality polish I already own.  The caveat: I do not have mad skilz at doing my own French manicures.  So much so that I don’t even attempt it.

Till now.

For my birthday, Whit got me a kit of Elegant Touch French manicure tips.  These little geniuses look like press-on nails, but it is really just a press-on strip of white polish that is perfectly fitted to your nails, and comes in about 14 different sizes to fit just about everyone’s digits.


You select the tips to match each nail on your hand.


Trim and file your nails to a short squarish shape.  Buff your nail surface to remove any yellowing that may have occurred from any color polish you had on before.

Apply the included glue to the white tip, as directed, and immediately press the tip onto your nail, as directed.  Then clip the plastic part off, again as directed.  I’m not sure how it works, but when you clip the plastic off with the nail clipper, the white tip stays on just right, except the little center nub of the white, which you file down.

As instructed, file the white to match your natural nail.  If you do not do this (as I learned the hard way) the white will break off.  If you do file to match, it will last for well over a week.

Now paint one coat of the included base polish and two coats of the included top coat.  It says you can also paint a light pink polish in there too, but I don’t care for that look as much as the natural look, so I didn’t do that.


I did have to do a little maintenance the first time I wore this.  The sides wanted to come up a little from wear, so I added a little more glue and more top coat, and got a few more days out of the manicure.

The whole process took me about 30 minutes, plus drying time, which I’m liberal about from bad experiences in the past.

Friends, this kit cost about $15 and you should get 3 manicures out of it.  Even I can do that math - $5 per manicure, which is about a 5th of the cost, minimum, of a basic French manicure at a nail salon.  And the last time I got a basic French manicure (polish only) at a nail salon, it literally lasted 2 days.  True story.  And when I got the gel manicures, those lasted for 3 weeks between fills, but you could see grow-out, and the tips were hand-painted on, so they were not as straight and perfect as these tips are, and much thicker; not to mention those manicures cost $40 each time.  If you calculate it out, this manicure, with a little maintenance, lasted me a week and a half.  That means for $10, I could do 3 weeks worth of French manicure.

Awesome!


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