How To Get That Picture Perfect Manicure

I get lots of comments from people wondering how I apply my nail polish so neatly. The answer is: I don't. I drink far too much iced coffee and Diet Mt. Dew to get the perfect application that I long for. I also find myself struggling with some difficult nail polish formulas and brushes so that all adds up to messy application. Even with the perfect formula and brush, I still sometimes get a little messy.

So I cheat. I clean up my polish after I finish my manicure and nobody ever has to know that it looked a little messy before. I'll walk you through what I do to get a picture perfect manicure so you can do the same. I'd like to point out that this tutorial is a remake of my original Nail Polish Clean-Up Tutorial from MakeupAlley.

First off, the supplies. I use 100% acetone. Yes it's drying, but it works so well. You can try using your regular nail polish remover, but nothing works quite as well as straight acetone. I've heard that nail polish thinner also works, but I haven't tried that. I got this acetone at Sally Beauty Supply and it was only a couple bucks. You don't have to use much so the bottle will last you a very long time.

I'm aware that there are conflicting opinions on the potential dangers of using acetone and the amount that is absorbed through your skin. I've read both sides of the story and I choose to use it to clean up. If you prefer not to, you would want to find an alternative to this method of clean up.

Be very careful with straight acetone! It will eat through the finish on your table, laptop, cell phone, anything that's painted, etc. so if you spill it there's no way to work fast enough to get it off before it ruins the finish. It's also highly flammable and volatile so if you smoke or have any type of open flame nearby, you can start a fire. Acetone smells pretty bad, but don't even think of burning a scented candle nearby. You could ignite the fumes and be in for a world of hurt.

You also don't want to pour acetone down your drain or toilet. It can melt the plastic pipes in your sink and I don't know about the water district where you live, but my water company is always sending out flyers on what not to flush down the toilet. They've made it a point to remind homeowners not to flush flammable substances. I've never had to dispose of straight acetone, but I've heard soaking it up with an old rag and letting it evaporate outside is one way. If you have a good way, let me know in the comment section.

You're also going to need some type of brush for the clean up. I've used paintbrushes and eyeshadow brushes and they both work well. The brush you choose is a very individual thing. I used to love my American Painter #6 Filbert (that I bought at JoAnn's Fabrics), but once it started showing signs of wear and tear, I replaced it with the exact brush and the new one didn't work as well. The new one's bristles aren't as stiff as my old favorite so that made me fall out of love with it.

I gathered up all the small brushes around my house and tried out each of them. The one I like best now is my EcoTools eyeshadow brush. I purchased it at Target and originally intended on using it for eyeshadow. I didn't like it for eyeshadow (it's too slippery or something) so I tried it for nail polish clean up and fell in love with it for that purpose. I like how it holds more liquid than the Filbert so I don't have to dip into the acetone as often.

It's starting to show signs of wear and tear so I'm probably going to need a new one soon. See how my EcoTools brush is starting to look a little haggard? I've been using it almost every night for several months now so I've been able to get a lot of use from it. I predict I'll still be able to get a lot more use out of it, though.  I've actually been using this one for about a year now and though it still looks pretty ragged, it's holding up quite well.

So now that you've got your brush and acetone, that's all you need! You also might want to have a small glass or ceramic bowl (or cup) to pour the acetone into, but I dip my brush directly into the bottle and have never had a problem. I wouldn't use plastic, though. I once poured acetone into a plastic cup and it ate through the bottom. What a mess that was!

You also might want to have a napkin or paper towel to wipe your brush on once it gets some polish on it. I am lazy and if there's excess polish on my brush, I dip into the acetone a few times to wash it off. I haven't had any problems in the 16 months I've been doing this so I don't think the napkin is necessary.

One important thing about cleaning up is you still want to try to be neat when applying your polish. The neater you are in applying, the easier clean up will be. I always try to create a gap when I'm painting and I try to avoid getting polish on my cuticles. I even try to avoid getting basecoat and topcoat on my cuticles. However, more often than not, I find that I get polish flooding my cuticle at least once per manicure. This clean-up method can fix it, but it takes longer to clean up a flooded cuticle.

Another reason to be neat from the start is that some polishes are a pain in the butt to clean up. Polishes with a lot of pigment will be harder to remove with the acetone. For instance, OPI Smitten With Mittens and OPI Vodka & Caviar were a nightmare to clean up! You don't want to know how long it took me to get my manicure looking halfway decent when I wore those.

Polishes that contain glitter or flakes can also be difficult to clean up. Glitter and flakes don't dissolve in acetone (at least not in the small amount of time you have them in contact on your nails) so a lot of times you'll have a flake or a piece of glitter sticking out along the edge of your gap. I clean these up while my polish is still pretty wet so I can use my clean-up brush to push any stray glitter or flakes to where I want them.

Here's a picture of what can happen when you clean up a flakie polish. I didn't push the flake where I wanted it to be so it just kinda hung out along the edge. It's not very noticeable in real life, but macro shots pick up all the gory details.

With that said, this method works like a charm on creams and jellies. I've also found that it's easier for me to clean up a darker polish. I guess because it's easier to see?

Something else I've noticed that makes clean up easier is maintaining your cuticles. If I slack on using cuticle softener and pushing back my cuticles, it's harder to get a nice clean gap. I use a cuticle softener and gently push my cuticles back about once a week and that seems to help make it easier to clean up.

In my original clean-up tutorial, I mentioned that I put top coat on and wait for my polish to be pretty dry before cleaning up.  However, I've noticed that it's much easier to clean up if I do it while my polish is pretty wet and before I put on top coat.  After cleaning up, I carefully apply top my top coat.  Since my polish is all cleaned up, usually I can apply my top coat neatly.  If I go outside the lines a bit, I usually just leave it since it doesn't really show much.  If you want, you can clean up the top coat as well with the brush and acetone.

What you see below is my manicure before clean up.  You can click on the pictures to make them larger, if you'd like.  As you can see, my manicure isn't terrible, but it's not as neat as I'd like. (I used OPI Malaga Wine for this tutorial, by the way.)

While I'm usually not bad at painting my right hand, my left hand comes out a little messier. There is polish on the skin around my nails and it's just messier in general.

To clean up, you're going to want to dip your brush right into the acetone. Wipe the excess off on the lip of the bottle and then gently sweep away the polish along the sides of your nail until it's as neat as you'd like. When I clean up the sides of my nails, I use my thumb (or my index finger when I'm cleaning up my thumbnail) to gently pull the skin beside each nail out of the way.

You also want to clean up your gap. Gently sweep the brush along the edge of your polish to neaten the edge.

Once you are done with all 10 nails you'll want to apply your top coat.  Wait a bit and gently wash and dry your hands. You don't want to be too vigorous since your polish is probably still dentable. It wouldn't be fun to spend all that time on getting a picture perfect manicure only to mess it up washing your hands.

You'll want to apply something for moisture now - either cuticle oil, cream, etc. Just use whatever you usually use for dry hands and cuticles. I apply these while my hands are still a little damp. I've found that these products work better when your hands aren't totally dry.

That's it! This is all I do to clean up. It takes two products and it's very simple. I've gotten much better through practice (at both applying polish and cleaning it up) so you will, too. When I first started cleaning up with a brush and acetone, it would take me about half an hour to do my clean up, but lately it's only been taking 10-15 minutes. It also depends on the type of polish (remember, pigmented polishes take longer), but you get better (and faster) with time. Here are a few close up pictures of the end result:

Keep in mind that these pictures were taken with the macro setting so it's really close up and exaggerated. The gap is definitely not as noticeable in real life. Plus, as you get better with painting your nails and cleaning up, you can make your gap even smaller. Mine is about half that size now.

And last, but not least, the overall manicure.

I hope you enjoyed my clean-up tutorial and let me know how it works out for you if you try it!

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Half-bottle woes? Tah-Dah!

THE ISSUE:


A third-to-half-empty bottle of polish (or base coat or top coat, whatever) - it shows you the lovely goods that it has to offer but it mocks your inability to get a good brush-full. If you're like me, you rarely buy backups of the same treatments simply because you're afraid of spending the money and then finding the New Wonder Product, leaving you with an extra bottle of shame.

THE ANSWER:

"What is it?", you say. What, you don't all have an extra ball of metallic silver silly putty hanging around? COME ON. Seriously, though - the color doesn't matter, of course - but it is silver putty. Two eggs full, to be exact.

THE END RESULT:


Tah-dah!!!! I'm not saying that I am a genius, I'm just saying that this works, ladies! Smoosh (technical term) the silly putty ball onto the table surface (or a piece of paper, if you're concerned about any damage to your table) and smoosh your bottle into the ball. What you are left with is a perfectly tilted bottle that allows for maximum brush dippage. Voila! I've seen specific tools that do this same trick on some nail supplier websites, but this is adjustable, cheap and a multi-tasker for those of you Alton Brown fans out there.

NOTE: As the silly putty will slump after a while, be sure to remove your bottle and put your putty away after you are done.

Well, will you try it?

Happy day, all!

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On slicing fimo canes

When I first posted about my receiving a big lot of fimo canes on eBay from a Hong Kong seller, quite a few of you responded with questions on how the heck these things were used. So I thought I'd attempt a little tutorial on how I slice fimo canes since my method is a bit different than a lot of the ones I've found on YouTube and on other blogs.

The first question on slice thickness I've already answered but I'll repeat it: you can slice them as thick as you want and, if you have the right blade and reasonably steady hand, you can slice them practically paper thin. You might not want them paper thin because when they are very thin, they are translucent and have a tendency to curl up when glued on the nail and covered with a topcoat.

Here are a couple of slices of fimo leaves as compared to the thickness of a dime. The thickest one is a bit more than a third of the thickness of the dime. The thinnest is probably no thicker than a sheet of paper. As you can see, it's a bit more of a challenge to keep a uniform thickness slice to slice and even within slice. (I have a shaky hand and am lazy; a determined perfectionist could probably get them perfectly thin and even.)

Most fimo canes are about 2-2.5 inches long. I can cut about 80 slices per inch.

The second question is what to use to slice fimo canes. I originally started with an exacto knife but that tended to warp and smudge the designs. I then turned to a tissue razor I had bought off of eBay awhile back for other artsy-craftsy activities. (Individually, on eBay, they go for a couple of dollars the last time I checked but I managed to get ahold of a pack of ten that came with another 50-fimo-cane lot.)

Tissue blades are very thin and pretty sharp. And had the unfortunate tendency of nicking the sides of my nails while I sliced. They cut through these canes beautifully and I think they're worth the investment for how easy they'll make cutting through the fimo.

As I already mentioned, I feel like I slice fimo slightly differently than other people who have blogged (or vlogged... is that term even really used?) on it. The method I've seen most commonly was slicing the fimo cane as if it were, say, a cucumber... but smaller. That is, use one hand to steady the cane and the other hand to slice. Having questionable vision and often shaky hands, this was a miserable method: I got a lot of half-hearts and quarter-flowers and uneven shards of My Melody's face. So I switched around my technique to increase the stability of the blade while cutting. It's not fool-proof (as you shall see) but it works much better for me.

Excuse the bad photo but this was the best photo I got to show you how my fingers are placed:

1. Make the cane face you so you can keep an eye on the progression of the slice.

2. Decide how thickly cut you want the slice and position the blade.

3. Use both hands to hold the blade on either end of it (using your thumb and pointer finger). Optionally, use your middle finger to hold the cane steady behind the blade.

4. Push down slowly and evenly. Pay attention to try to insure uniform thickness and don't be afraid to slightly adjust the course of your blade if it starts to look like you're not going to get a complete slice... which I did not do for this next picture:

Oops! This is a mistake I made far more in the beginning than now but I was unsuccessful in my half hour endeavor to get a good photo of my slicing off a good piece of fimo cane. But you guys get the point, right? :)

5. Finally, remember to rotate the fimo cane so that one side doesn't get too flat. For instance, if I were to continue slicing this kitty face, I'd flip it onto its ears and cut a few slices like that before rotating it to the side of its face again.

Understanding that this is not the most clear or helpful tutorial ever, I made a short video just showing you the action of slicing the fimo:

I love slicing fimo! It's my new nervous activity: when I'm super stressed, I start slicing away. I even bought some organizers to accommodate this new quirky, compulsive sub-hobby. (Woohoo, dollar stores...)

Isn't it so cute? I have these grouped according to some logical system that makes sense to me (but may be weird to everyone else): "designs that come in circles", "flowers", "smileys", "fruits", "hearts", "teardrop/almond-shaped things that can be leaves", "things with faces", "cute and rectangular-like objects", "bugs and butterflies", "non-fruit food", "vaguely pentagonal shapes that can be stars or flowers".

"Flowers"

Some of these look like they were sliced quite thickly but almost none of them exceeded the thickness of half a dime.

"Fruits"

"Things with faces"

Anyway, I hope this post helped somebody out. :)

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How to Make Your Own Lightbox Tutorial!

Just letting everyone know that I have a backlog of emails and MUA PMs that I'm working through and I hope to clear out my inbox by next Monday. I am so sorry if I haven't responded yet to your messages!

Also... I am trying a bit harder to keep up with comments. Safari hates the commenting system Blogger uses so I end up losing comments... and then end up being too frustrated to retype them. (Lame excuse, I know.) I will answer everything eventually, if very slowly. :(

And because mKat asked about my lightbox. Here it is! In all its amateur handmade glory.

My SO bought the materials to make it for me as an anniversary-of-our-meeting present back in December. Why? Because he knew it was hard for me to get swatching done in the winter! I'm on campus all day and by the time I get home, it's already dark. Flash swatch photos can be extremely color-inaccurate and the lighting in our apartment is insufficient to take good photos without flash. So to make my life easier, he wanted to build me a lightbox. (He thought of buying me one but they are too expensive.)

He went to Michael's, an arts and crafts chain, and bought the following materials:

• Five 20x30 white foam core boards
• Clear packaging tape
• Four cheap clip-on lamps (though we ended up only using two) like these:

• Four 100 watt (1750 lumens) EcoSmart True Color (compact fluorescent) simulated daylight lightbulbs like these:

• You will also need a ruler, a pencil and a box-cutter.

n.b. Technically, any "daylight" bulb is supposed to be able to work but the first bulbs the SO bought (full-spectrum normal bulbs found at drugstores) were too yellow. The light needs to be white.

How to construct a cheapie-but-workable lightbox:

• Decide how big you want your lightbox to be. Originally, my SO made it 20" x 20" x 20" which was ginormous for taking pictures of my nails. The lightbox I'm using now is the lightbox he made... except I took it apart and made it smaller. (And more lopsided. Not purposefully. His lightbox was much prettier before I redid it.) The dimensions of mine are 17" x 17" x 17".

• Very lightly in pencil, outline the size you want your lightbox to be on your five foam core boards. Each piece should be the same size: in my case, 17" x 17".

• Use the box-cutter to cut out the pieces, preferably using the ruler as a guide (I freehanded this and it was baaad). Be sure to do this on a surface that you are willing to destroy. I put down a couple of pieces of old cardboard on the carpeted floor underneath the foam core boards before I started cutting.

• Tape the foam core boards together in the shape of a box (that's missing a side, obviously). Make sure that there's no gap between the boards that could let in light. If you are a sloppy cutter like me, this might be impossible. Just do your best. A few small gaps won't ruin the whole project. :) I wish I could offer better advice on how to do this step effectively. It took my SO the longest when he did it. It took me the longest when I redid it.

• Find a place for the lightbox to live. Once you attach the lamps, it's a bit of a pain to move around.

• Clip the lamps on either side of the box (you can use all four or just two, depending on the size of the box): apparently, the objective is to try to fill the box evenly with light rather than concentrating the light on a certain location within the box. I kind of ignore that and shift the lights around depending on what I'm lighting (very easy to do with adjustable clip-on lamps).

Lights off!

Lights on!

You can be totally done and happy with this... or if you're like me and think the thing's still too big and bulky, you can choose to recess the lights a bit by cutting out a rectangular section of two sides of the board.

If you know in advance you want to do this, do all the cutting in the beginning of the process rather than cutting out these rectangles out of a completed lightbox. Why? Because you might get something like this:

Unevenly cut rectangles (in addition to a lopsided box). Pretty ugly!

I do feel honor-bound to tell you that you might still need to fiddle with one or two camera settings to get a photo whose colors look true to life. My camera's "Smart Auto" function is kinda dumb: it takes pristine photos in non-ideal light and non-ideal photos in pristine light. When taking photos using my lightbox, I get around this annoying tendency of my camera by changing the EV (exposure value) to +0.3, which brightens the photos. I still like taking natural daylight photos when I get the chance -- especially because natural light is more forgiving on my often-dry cuticles -- but I'm now pretty comfortable taking photos of the following types of polishes using my lightbox:

• Most cremes and jellies, including vampies, pastels and neons (except oranges and red-leaning purples, which are hard for me to capture regardless of light)
• Most shimmers (except for light shimmers in a light base)
• Most metallics, pearls, foils and frost
• Single-colored glitters (like all gold, or all purple)

I still however leave photos of duochromes, holographics, flakies and multi-colored glitters to natural daylight. Any polish that is best shown with light bouncing off of it in different ways (and usually needs video to show off its awesomeness), I prefer to swatch in sunlight.

One day, I'll learn how to use a camera (and about the manipulation of color and light) for real but for now, I get pretty decent pics this way so... camera-color-and-light-ignorant I shall remain.

Anyway, I hope this satisfied at least mKat's curiosity. :)

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