But anyway, these are my nails!
This is the first time I've ever used a SuperNail ProGel shade (FYI Ulta is clearing out their stock of them, so if you want to buy some cheap without resorting to the internet, go now before it's too late!) "Creamy Nude" is a nice sheer tan-based color without any shimmers or any pink cast as many french manicure colors have. It would have worked great as a sheer at one coat; that's how well it evened out on my nails. Buuuuut stupid me REALLY wanted this color to be a good opaque, since it matches my skin-tone amazingly. I kept layering the color on, so what you see here is three coats. It looks very thick on my nails, although I thought I applied thinly enough, and the polish itself was not too thick and goopy. Even at three coats, you can still see visibile nail line and a moon shape if you look closely--you know, at least in real life before I covered it up with stripes! Next time I will definitely not be trying to make this opaque again. Oops! It's still a nice formula and a nice color, though. I've only had this on for about 4 days, so we'll see about the wear later on.
On top of that I have Gelish "Silver Sand", which is a really confusing color to put on and capture on camera. It's two sizes of hexagonal glitters that are a sheer opalescent color in a clear gel base; some of the glitters shift pink, some shift yellow, some shift purple/blue... so when the light hits it right it kind of looks like a candy shop on your nails. BUT since the glitters are essentially clear at the base, in certain lights you don't see them at all, and when you're applying the polish, it can make it really hard to make sure you have glitters evenly placed on the nail, and not too sparse in one area or too concentrated in another. I only used one coat, so maybe you can see how the glitter placement is pretty random from nail to nail. It's not a very dense glitter, either, so you wouldn't be able to build this one up to look like a "sheet" of glitter! It's more to accent or enhance the color you put it over.
Here's a close up I took of Silver Sand on my thumb. On the left you can see that the left-most side of my nail doesn't look very sparkly, while the right hand side does--that's how this glitter "shines" and "hides" depending on the light. And actually, in the right picture, you can see that the smaller glitters, while sometimes hexagonal, are not always properly cut, making this look a little more "random".
Lastly, my Striping Tape. You can probably see in these pictures that there is some curling around the edges of my nails. For some reason--maybe it's how the tape reacts to the gels, maybe I destroyed some of the adhesive while trying to place it, etc-- quite a few of the stripes on my nails are starting to lift up on the sides. Since they're not threatening to take off the top coats of my gel and destroy my entire "manicure", it's like they floated to the top of the completely cured gel layer! Strangely enough, too, the parts that curl up are entirely clear, like it's a clear plastic layer that was put as a protective coat over the metallic layer of the tape. The metallic part underneath does not lift up and create a curl or a string, but eventually just "wears" away soon after the plastic lifts.
I did not place the tape entirely flat, either, but that's on the middle of my nails where I had to curve it so it buckled a bit. So far that is still holding in place ok, despite the fact that two top coats did not entirely cover it up. My error!
I am trying my best not to let it bother me, and my nails still look ok from a normal-person's distance, but I am definitely going to have to pay closer attention the next time I apply the striping tape.
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