#if you put a thick blob of gel under the lamp and cure it the only sticky part should be the inhibition layer at the very top

[angsttronaut]

makes me cringe how many gel nail lamps are sold that probably can't fully cure the polish

[vampiricgf]

I would love a tutorial on some nail art if you want to? The ZZZ ones 💜

okay so I finally have some time to walk through the steps on how I did these ellen nails for you anon! :3

(under the cut because it's a long explanation)

With false nails sometimes you have to file them down and reshape a bit so if you have to do that with plain false nails do that first then clean them off with some 70% alcohol and attach to a base like I have them above in the picture. I use some sticky tabs to just pop them on so I'm not touching uncured gels or anything while working and it makes doing designs easier, remember to wear gloves!

I started with the thumbs first and the shark face design. With a thin detail brush get some grey polish on the tip, not a ton just enough to do a thin line down the middle of the nail. To get it as even as possible I turned the nail so the top point was facing downward and dragged the brush from the tip up to make an even split. Then you can take the brush cap from the grey polish and put a lil blob on the left side, use your tiny detail brush to move the gel around and make sure it's covering the surface evenly. Pop that under the lamp to cure, then fill in the white half the same way (make sure to clean your detail brush!)

Now take that same small brush and get a tiny dot of black on the very tip, you're gonna just pop that down a little bit away from the cuticle edge of the nail right on the line that divides the two colors, cure it again. Clean the brush and then get a little white polish on it, slowly swirl that around the black dot until it looks like a lil fish eye. Cure again. On the white half take that same grey shade and make like a half heart, you want that bend from the cuticle line then dragging it downward to give the mouth shape. Cure again. Take some white on the brush and make triangles for the teeth, they don't have to be perfect but try to get them as even as you can. Cure. Then fill in the area above the teeth design with red polish. Cure. Take your top coat, layer it on, and make sure you're sealing the free edge to prevent chipping then cure.

For the index and pinky nails just use the same red shade used for the sharks mouth, top coat it and those are done.

The middle nail you wanna lay down an even coat of that same red and cure it. Once that's done take your white polish on your detail brush and draw your fish skeleton, I used ellen's tail stickers as a reference and the design is pretty easy to replicate. (Sorry for the blurriness, zooming and cropping made it look like shit but the design is still legible and you can also copy the clearer one in the nail pic).

once you've got the fishbone to your liking cure it. Then take more white on the brush and follow the outside edge of the nail the entire way around, you're basically just tracing the shape and emphasizing it. Be mindful of the line thickness but with a thin detail brush it shouldn't get crazy. Cure that once finished and then topcoat it and cure again.

For the ring finger nails use the same grey shade used on the shark face to coat the entire nail and cure. Now the lettering is tricky, you want sharp lines which I know is hard because rarely anyone writes that way naturally but make sure the pic of her tail is pulled up somewhere you can be consistently looking at or the pic of those nails since it's clearer, it took me a while to match the lettering in a way I was happy with. If it's wonky just wipe the nail off and try again! once you're happy with the way it looks cure it, top coat it, and cure again.

And tada! You have a super cute set of ellen joe nails you can pop on with some glue :3 if you're using non gel polish obviously you can skip the curing steps and just wait for those to dry as needed before continuing

[nailsandart-blog]

RECENT POSTS

The Differences Between Acrylic and Gel

Post by Kathy Phuong Tran, June 4, 2017.

About Acrylic Nails :

The term "Acrylic Nails" usually refers to liquid and powder mixes, which are combined in front of you into a blob of dough, shaped onto your nail with a brush, and then air dried. Acrylics are also widely available and tend to be less expensive than gel. But a major drawback is the horrible smell liquid and powder systems usually give off during application.

About Gel Nails :

Gel is always that—thick, goopy gel. It can come in a bottle or a pot, but it’s never mixed on the spot like acrylic. It is usually cured with a UV or LED lamp.

Comfort & Flexibility:

Most people do not like acrylic nails because of the uneasiness that follows to the cuticle and how heavy it feels. Gel nails, on the other hand, are just like a gel, feels really light and take their shape themselves and hence are very easy on the hands. Acrylic nails are hard and also look thicker than gel nails. Any stress applied to acrylic nails can hurt the original nail. Gel nails are flexible and not hard on the touch.

General:

For added length, the products are applied either over a tip — a long piece of plastic glued to the end of  your nail — or over a form which is call sculpting nails, instead of a plastic tip it’s a little sticker under your natural nail that guides the extension and peels off once the nail is hard. I personally prefer gel nails when compared to acrylic because it is a flexible monomer. Acrylic is much harder. We want our nails to bend when whacked against something hard. Gel provides that flexibility. My experience is that the gel takes the brunt of the force and cracks, but my nail won’t break. Nail extensions can be the subject of misleading marketing, customer misinformation, and even outright fraud. "Acrylic is liquid and powder, gel is gel. Period. If your nail tech can't tell you exactly what the product is called, if it comes out of a labeled mystery pot, or [they] insist it's gel even though it's powder, you're probably sitting in the wrong chair.

Gel is usually more expensive than other systems, but is it better?

A lot is marketing. "When gel first started being promoted, everyone was like, ‘It’s much safer, it doesn’t damage nails.’ Consumer perception allowed salons to charge more — plus, you can’t sell gels in gallon containers like you can acrylics, so you can’t get a volume discount."

Some technicians will tell clients a product is a gel/acrylic hybrid, or a "powder gel." Neither of those exist, although it is possible to put a gel nail polish over liquid and powder acrylics. "Solar," "crystal," and "diamond" nails are all phrases salons use to make either gel, liquid and powder, or dip systems sound fancier. But they’re still going to be the same basic technology.

As for safety, when done properly, fake nails shouldn’t damage your nails much. Most damage attributed to nail extensions is actually caused by over-filing the nails, which is most likely to happen when a technician forgoes a hand buffer in favor of a drill fitted with a file tip to remove the top layer of natural nail or some think the more you file the more it will last but it’s not. Some over-filing can be attributed to history. In the bad old days, fake nails were often made out of methyl methacrylate, or MMA, more commonly used for making tooth crowns and cementing hip and knee replacements to bone. It is also the raw material for making Plexiglas.

"[MMA] doesn’t bond to the nail all that well, so the techs would shred the natural nail with a coarse file to make the MMA stick. It’s very hard to soften in acetone, and you’ve shredded the nail so when you remove it you damage the nail tremendously," said Paul Bryson, a chemist and the director of regulatory compliance at OPI.

After the nail is filed down that far, it is much weaker than the MMA. If the fake nail catches on something, the damaged natural nail is more likely to give way than the super-rigid plastic, resulting in injuries — including the whole natural nail tearing off the finger.