Pretty Fingernails

Japanese girls have the fanciest fingernails I have ever seen.  I'm always checking out other peoples hands on the subway to see what the latest looks are.  Gel manicures have been popular for a while, but they don't stop at fun colors, it's pretty common to see nails that have been bedazzled with little gems or pearls (fake, obviously) or charms even.  Sometimes I wonder how ladies are even able to use their phones with such blinged out nails.

With all the fanciness going on around me I've been keeping my nails painted most of the time, but I only recently ventured into territory any more exciting than that.  My nails are pretty weak so I haven't wanted to try a gel manicure, I'm pretty sure my nails would be destroyed!  Plus it's a lot more money than painting them myself.  But I recently found a really beautiful set of sparkly blue nail polish stickers.  You know, those strips that you peel off and stick onto your nails?  I'd heard good things, but never tried them.  So I bought these stickers, but before using them I thought I'd do a trail run with a set I'd gotten for free in a magazine.  If I was going to ruin them, I wanted to do it with a set I didn't care so much about.

The way it works is you peel off the polish and apply it to the bare nail, starting from the cuticle and smoothing it down the nail.  At the end you fold the strip down and file it away.  I read online that to smooth out any air bubbles and to help them stick you can blast them with a hair dryer for a few seconds afterwards. Easy, right?  Sort of.  They actually go onto the nail pretty easily.  I thought it would be more difficult, but that wasn't the problem at all.  Filing them off was. It was hard to get the file to tear through the sticker, and then it left the end a little ragged.  The first set I did  evened out a lot during the first day, but the second set is still pretty rough.  I found the hair dryer helped a lot with air bubbles on the first round, but on the second I didn't really have any to worry about.   After I put them on I was worried they would immediately peel off, but the first set held really well!  Eventually the pattern started to flake off but the white layer stayed attached to my nails.  The problem was taking them off.  Maybe the Japanese ones are different, but polish remover didn't dissolve them, and eventually I had to peel them off.  The only problem was they tore off the top layer of my nails!  Ick!  I did a lot of googling and can't find any other accounts of this.  I do have really weak nails - maybe they're the weakest in the world.  Or maybe the hair dryer made them stick too well?  I don't know.  I was hesitant to do the second set after that, so after giving my nails a couple weeks to recover I did the second set with Raku.  She did hers on bare nails, but I put on a base coat of polish first to make removal easier.  Now I'm having the complete opposite problem.  They're trying to peel off all the time, but Raku reports the same problem so I don't think it's the nail polish.  Either way, they're cute but I don't think these will last more than a few days.  They're a fun idea, but maybe more trouble than they're worth.

In other news, Strawberry Sandwiches are back at 7-Eleven!  It seems they have a blueberry sandwich this year as well, which I haven't tried yet but appears to be blueberry jam and cream cheese.