Confession time: I’m a nail polish whore. Makeup on my face just irritates me and makes me sweat, which is why I generally don’t wear any; and I’m planning on bringing minimal makeup with me to Utah. But I don’t feel “dressed up” if my nails are naked.
This is a fairly recent development, since when I was in school, I was a nail biter. It took an act of will to leave my nails alone long enough for them to be paintable. And of course, my nails are naturally thin with a tendency to snag and rip. So for the most part, I only needed two bottles of nail polish when I was in school – clear for pantyhose and tights, and black. If I told you I wore a lot of plaid flannel, I bet you could pinpoint my graduation year pretty closely. 🙂 And since my toes were always locked in combat boots, I didn’t care what my toenails looked like. Which is a good thing, because . . . lets not talk about that, mmkay?
Cut to now: I have literally every color of the rainbow in nail polish. Except orange. Because I hate orange, and 99% of oranges look awful on me. I have also started going to the salon to get mani/pedis. This started because my toenails actually were all long enough to do something with, but I’m still too big to be able to pull my knee to my chest and hold it while I try to paint my toenails. Soooooon . . .
For some reason, toenail polish (on me, YMMV) lasts for weeks and weeks and weeks; while polish on my fingernails lasts 2 days, max before getting a chip or snag or something. Not a problem for me, I just go to my extensive polish collection and repaint.
I am not going to have time to repaint my nails in Utah.
So, I decided to try out gel nail polish (or shellac). Because my nails are so thin, I have never been interested in acrylic nails (seriously, I don’t need thinner nails which are permanently damaged on top of that). But after doing a lot of research online, I decided that this would be the way to go if I want nice looking painted nails the entire time I was in Utah. But I wanted to test them. And luckily, I came to this decision more than a month before my trip. 🙂
So my nails have had this pretty taupe color on them for the last 12 days. As you can see, my nails have grown quite a bit since I got them painted (notice the unpainted nail by my cuticles?), but NO CHIPS. In fact, the gel seems to have protected my nails from the snags I get constantly on the sides of my nails – I’ve only had to file a couple of rough spots over the past week and a half. I did get a bad snag on my other hand, but I normally am filing every other day so this was definitely an improvement.
The plan is:
- Get manicure with gel nail polish.
- Go back to salon to get it removed when it looks like crud, or after 2 weeks – whichever comes first. (if it only lasted 3-4 days, it’s not worth it)
- Leave nails unpolished (or use my Julep nail polish, which allows oxygen get to the nail bed – important for recovery) for the next couple of weeks.
- Get manicure with gel nail polish the Monday before I leave so that my nails are fabulous all weekend long! (I’m thinking navy . . .) (also, remember to bring the sunscreen this time)
- Probably never get another gel manicure again, unless I have another trip where I want my nails to look nice for a week or more.
- Profit??? *grins*
Have you had a gel manicure? How was your experience? Also, if you are a nail polish whore like me and haven’t checked out Julep yet, you MUST GO. 🙂 If you want to help me earn credits, you can use this link. I really am happy with their monthly boxes, and even splurged on the October full collection, because it’s awesome. Not all of them are, though (September was fine, it just didn’t make me go “must have ALL THE POLISHES!!” the way October’s collection did).
Earning my Adventurer Badge 