My first foil mani

Hey Everyone!!! That was a long break. Sorry about that. I am back! I might not be back with daily posts yet but I will definitely be posting more than the past few weeks. The house is still crazy with redoing the floors and moving everything around but life in general is not as stressful. 

This mani is from before the break both from blogging and of all my nails. Right now I am sporting major nubbins. In these pictures my pinky and ring nails were literally holding on by silk wraps and glue and finally gave out. I had cut them all down and all was well until they decided to break even shorter. It has been a long battle keeping my nails long especially with all of the time I spend at the kennel. Dog crates and muzzles do not treat nails well. Even with the gel manis I try to keep on there to protect them a bit. 

I had looked at nail foils for a very long time and loved the manis I saw people do using this medium but for some reason it took me way too long to try it out. I ordered two different foils from BornPrettyStore not long ago to give it a try. 

**Image used from BornPrettyStore.com**

They are .99 cents for a sheet and I decided I had to give it a try. I absolutely loved this mani. I took a ton of pictures of it because it was so very cool looking. I can't even remember how long I wore it before reluctantly removing it.

I started with a dark base that was an almost black teal. I was lazy and painted it over the red I already had on which is why you see red around the cuticles. Now I didn't order the foil adhesive because I just didn't think about it at the time. I didn't really need it but I did have to look up several places to find out how to apply the foils without adhesive.

Basically I cut small rectangles out of the sheet of foil. They were big enough to cover my entire nails but not much bigger so I didn't waste any. I ordered #18 which is a rainbow sheet. 

Honestly I wanted to do the entire nail in foil so it was a solid look instead of what it turned out as. Something Minx looking. Obviously that didn't work out but it was my first attempt. I tried using a top coat then waiting till it was almost dry to apply the foils. What I realized after trial and error is that I could apply the foil to the base color just as easily. I painted my nail with the base color then waited until it was almost dry. When it was almost dry I lightly pressed the foil to the nail and removed the clear backing. If I let the polish dry a little too much foil didn't transfer as well in those areas. It was a trial and error event but by the end it was pretty easy to manage.

If spots were missing some foil I went back over them and rubbed some more foil on. The sheet is roughly 12 inches long by 4 inches wide. I had plenty of this sheet left over for many more uses. The sheet comes folded into a square and packaged in a plastic sleeve like the picture above shows. They are really the perfect size for someone, like me, who wants to try foils out without committing to a whole roll. 

I am going over my next foil mani in my head right now. I think I might be trying the other pattern I bought, #76, tonight with a gel mani. I will see if I can get that to work together.

I thought my thumbs came out really cool so I figured I would show them this time.

The foils were really pretty and glowy.

That's all for now :)