Christmas Candy Canes!

I wanted to hop on quickly and post my Christmas nails! They are super cute and I feel really proud of them. They look great from a distance! The holidays are CRAZY here with lots of wrapping and traveling between families so I can't write up a long post, but I used nail art tape and Sally Hansen Instant Dry in white and Sally Hansen Diamond Strength in Honeymoon Red. :)

Here are some process shots:

First, I painted my nails white. I left this to harden overnight. This is ESSENTIAL to tape manicures because even when they are dry on the surface, tape may rip the polish right off if it isn't completely hardened.

I love how white nail polish makes your fingertips glow, even in low light. :)

Then I paint on the red, nail by nail. I started with the blank white:

Then added my tape in stripes:

Then painted the whole nail red (This got messy, as I had to dab polish in on the corners to ensure complete red stripes)

Then, while the red polish was still wet, I peeled the tape back and my pretty stripes appeared!

Here's a few more in progress shots, this time of my thumb.

 While doing this, i noticed that I unintentionally lined up a few of the nails. Next time, I will do this on purpose!

As you can see, my cuticles got pretty gunky. I used nail polish remover on a cosmetic Q-tip (the kind that comes to a point) to clean that up. Here's a few looks at the full effect:

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy Polishing. :)

Return!

*blows the dust off my keyboard and stretches my hands*
Why, hello there, blog! Fancy meeting you here...

Okay, so, I've been neglecting this page. My last post mentioned that I had been having issues with peeling and breaking nails and that I was embarking on a nail treatment to review.

In my head, I would post pictures of my original peeling nails (which I have but I'm not sure anyone wants to see) and frequent updates on how well they were improving until finally, I would emerge with long beautiful nail ready to model the greatest in lacquer!

I was completely unprepared for them to get worse. The treatment sort of stopped the peeling but the whole nail got harder and brittle and then all my free edges snapped off one by one in a little parade of sadness and dashed hopes.

I tried another treatment and it helped tremendously with the breaking-off-because-we-hate-you nail tips, but my nails had stopped growing. Eek! So, I decided to just wait it out, willing myself to not mess with them until they were long enough to file to a nice curve.

And still, they are pretty short. They are still easily broken off, and my nail beds are and always will be tremendously short. But I discovered something! I was lamenting all this time that my nails weren't blog worthy because I haven't seen other blogs with shortie nails, but I could be the shortie nail blogger!

I want women to know they are beautiful in whatever shape or size they happen to come, so why on earth was I ashamed of my short nails? Hypocrisy! I haz it!

I will no longer hold myself to a standard that doesn't fit all! I like long nails, and I will still try to grow them out when I can, but when they break off or peel and they need to be short, I'm still going to show you what I can do with it, and I hope that you feel encouraged to do the same.

Happy polishing!