I’ve been a terrible nail picker and biter my whole life. I think it started as a nervous habit, but even when I’m not struggling with anxiety it has remained a lifelong struggle. In addition, even when I’m taking good care of my nails, I got my grandma’s weak nail genes, so it’s nearly impossible for me to live my life with nothing on my nails. I really enjoy going to the salon to get my nails done and I love having acrylic nails that are just a bit longer than my natural nails can stand to be (I don’t like to have very long nails personally), but it’s too expensive in the long term for me to be able to maintain, even when I try to stretch to as close to four weeks between fills as I can. Just a couple of months ago I was able to find a nail tech that I wanted to commit to, but only a couple of weeks later I spent $100 on Amazon to buy supplies to do my own nails at home. It’s been about two months now of figuring out how it all works, and I think I’ve made some really great progress so far, so I wanted to talk about my journey and what I’ve learned along the way (with pictures!)
Let me start by laying out everything I got in that first Amazon order. I bought the Gelish Terrific Trio set that comes with the pH bond coat, the foundation coat, and top coat. I also bought the Gelish clear structure gel for some extra support for my weak nails. To start myself off with a few colors, I got this set from GAOY. It comes in other color groups as well, but I thought this would be a good set to start with because I felt like there was a lot I could do with just these few colors. And for a little extra pizzazz I got this white pearl chrome powder to go with it. To finish off my first order, I also got this UV lamp from SUNUV and these gloves from AIRSEE to protect my hands from the UV light. With the amount of money that it would take me to get two acrylic fills, I was able to set myself up for months of at-home gel manicures.
My first attempt using these products is another story. It was kind of a mess. It was ugly. I didn’t love what I came up with, but I learned a lot from that first try. I realized that my typical approach to applying regular nail polish was not going to work with gel polish. Usually I’m very haphazard when painting my nails because I can always wipe off any extra while it’s drying, or if any polish does end up drying onto my skin, it’s pretty easy to pick off or clean up. Gel nail polish is very different because once you cure it under the lamp, it’s pretty much stuck there. I wish I had a picture of how it looked before I cleaned it up as best as I could. The final product definitely wasn’t great, but the way it looked as soon as I finished was much, much worse. I learned a lot about how to apply the polish and how to apply the chrome powder, because that was a contributing factor in what went wrong with this set. The cool part, though, was that this set lasted almost two weeks, which is longer than any other set I’ve done so far (probably because of how thick the coats were lol).
This was my first attempt after doing a lot of clipping away at that overflow that I cured onto myself.
My next set was much simpler and looked, I think, much better. It more closely resembled a regular manicure, which was fine with me. I wanted to experiment a little bit with the colors I got, since I had only used one on the first set. There isn’t too much to say about this set, but I definitely worked hard to implement what I learned about polish application from the first set. I used much thinner layers and made sure to clean as well as I could before curing anything. The following set has just about the same story to it also. I tried to keep my sets very simple while I worked on getting the polish application down.
All I really disliked about this set was the fall color scheme in early June.
I did another set very similar to the last, which was evidently so unremarkable that I nearly forgot to write about it at all. Here it is.
The forgotten set.
Last month I decided to get some more supplies. I felt like I had started to get the basics down a bit better and I was ready to dip my toe into some nail art. I went back to Amazon for another $77 order and I got a lot of cool stuff to add to my little pink box of nail supplies. I got five new colors from GAOY: pink, blue, green, white, and purple. Also in the category of paint and colors, I got silver and gold thin liner polishes for nail art. I got this pack of bubble nail beads and this gel tube to glue them on. Last but not least, I picked out this pack of nail stickers too.
This was where I got a little too excited and bold with my ideas. I had some inspiration pictures I was using, but they were for much longer nails and were done by a professional nail tech, so my version didn’t come out looking quite like I hoped. I was really proud of them at the time, but in hindsight I find them hard to look at. It’s all a part of the learning curve. I used the gel tube for some 3D textures as well as to include some of the nail beads (most of them fell off). I learned that the set of nail beads I got are kind of weird in terms of size; I feel like they stick up way too much and it looks kind of odd. I also tried some ombre effects, some of which were not too bad, others were not great. There was a lot going on in that set, but again I think I learned a lot from all that mess.
I know it's not good, but I think I nailed the blue/brown ombre.
After that set I took a little break from doing my nails and did my best to keep my nails long and strong without any polish. I do have some nail strengthener that I used in this in-between phase and I was excited at how well my nails did in that period. They’re still pretty prone to breakage, but it seemed like they did a bit better than they have in the past.
When I was ready for color again, I was excited to try out my new pink polish. I had an idea of how I wanted this set to look with the pink and some of the nail stickers I had gotten. I actually did try them in that set where I tried ALL of the new fun things I got, but I ended up covering them up with the silver liner polish because I thought it looked better with everything else I had going on. I started putting the stickers on top of the pink polish, but it just wasn’t looking the way I had hoped, so I took them off. That was much harder than I expected and I was worried I was going to ruin the whole thing and have to start over, but I was able to make it happen. I just ended up going with the plain pink and I actually loved it. I think this is such a cute shade of pink. I didn’t take a picture when I was done painting like I usually do, so they don’t look as good in this photo since they were a few days old by that time. But I promise they were really cute.
This picture does not do the color justice at all. I swear the color was so cute and it looked way better with my skin tone too.
That brings us to my latest set that I did this past Sunday. I think this is my best set yet in terms of application and design. I used this photo from Pinterest as inspiration and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. I have never done different colors for each hand, but I’m really loving this combination. I was able to use the stickers in a way that makes me happy, and I think the chrome powder might be best when used in small doses like this. Same with the nail beads. I’ve also been working on maintaining the length and shape of my nails and I think that’s going relatively well too. I can’t stop looking at them, honestly.
Absolutely in love with this set.
Over the past two months or so I have learned so much and made a lot of progress with doing my nails. It has been really fun for me to work on getting better at this, and it has also been a great creative outlet for me. I tend to see it as another one of my crafts that I do, but I get to show off my work everywhere I go! I’m really excited to see what else I can do as time goes on and I get some more practice in. I’ll make sure to come back in a couple of months and do another showcase!
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