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Health & Fitness

[diy mani fail]

One of my favorite blogs is The Pintester. Last night, while watching her Cocknails tutorial, I was inspired to paint my own nails, which is something I rarely do, namely because I get bored halfway through and they always wind up looking like a seven year-old did them. But in a rare spout of motivation, I decided to give myself a manicure–and immediately regretted it.

For someone who rarely does her own nails, I have a pretty solid collection of nail polish colors. A few years ago, I went through a phase where I stopped biting my nails, and found out that not only did my nails have the ability to grow and grow fast, they were also really pretty. I went whole hog on the nail maintenance thing, filing and buffing them every other day, and trying out different nail polish colors. Alas, that phase didn’t last, and before long, I was back to chomping down on my nails. They, as well as my nail care routine, disappeared, and I was left with a smorgasbord of different colors. Pretty much useless most of the time, but handy to have around when the motivation to do my nails strikes.

I chose China Glaze’s “For Audrey” because it’s summertime, and I was feeling sassy. I started painting my nails, and even started wishing I had white nail polish so I could paint little bows on my ring fingers and complete the whole Tiffany blue box look. In my head, my nails would be all smooth and shiny, the bows drawn out perfectly. The whole thing would look like a frigging work of art. But I didn’t have any white polish, so instead I was committed to making the blue base look like a masterpiece.

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Two coats of polish (well, three on one hand) and a topcoat later, I was ready to rock and roll. For a DIY venture, my nails didn’t look half bad. I felt proud of myself. I finished just before ten o’clock, and after a quick check to make sure my nails were dry, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get ready for bed.

I have wavy hair, so before bed every night, I twist my hair into two pigtails so the waves would be maintained and smooth, and my hair won’t look like a rat’s nest when I wake up in the morning. After I brushed my teeth, I started to twist my hair and fasten them with hair ties–which is when I noticed that the hair ties were digging into the polish and screwing up my manicure. While my nail polish was “dry,” it still hadn’t fully set.

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I was ticked off. I had just spent a half hour painting the things, and I was tired and wanted to go to bed. But my jacked-up nails were bothering me, so I removed the damaged polish and began repainting the nails that had been affected. It was at this point that I noticed the polish on my other nails hadn’t fully set either, because bits of the cotton ball I used to remove the polish had stuck to them. So even before I could start repainting my nails, I had to carefully remove cotton ball hair in such a way so as not to screw up the polish on those nails.

After I removed the cotton ball pieces and repainted my nails, I decided to kick it up a notch. I plugged in my blow dryer and blasted those mofos with high heat. After a few minutes of that and nearly burning my hands, I put aside the blow dryer and did a check of my nails. They still weren’t completely set, but they were drier than before.

BT dubs, did you know that if you accidentally leave a fingerprint in your nail polish or otherwise screw up your manicure in a minor way and blast your nails with heat from a blow dryer, it causes the fingerprint to go away? This is probably common knowledge among those who do their nails on the reg, but it was a pretty exciting discovery for me, especially since my nail check left said fingerprint in my polish, and the last thing I wanted to do was repaint my nails again.

Okay, where were we? Oh, right, so after repainting my nails and blasting them with high heat, the polish on those mofos still hadn’t set entirely. At this point it was a quarter ’til eleven, so I decided to watch YouTube videos for the next 15 minutes. If by then they still hadn’t set, I would admit defeat and go to bed. I didn’t know what else to do.

I did another nail check at eleven, and–praise be–an hour and a half later, my nail polish had finally set. I even took a chance and twisted my hair again, because I refused to wake up with horrible hair on account of my manicure, and the polish still held up. Victory was mine, until I went to bed and woke up the next morning with pillow imprints on my nails.

I don’t know if it’s a China Glaze thing, or if my Sally Hansen-brand topcoat is especially awful, but I feel like if your polish still hasn’t fully set an hour and a half after you apply it, it’s a quality control problem. Of course, I did buy my China Glaze from a lady on eBay who bought a whole bunch of bottles and then re-sold them, so there’s a chance that it might not even be China Glaze brand at all and could be some crap off-brand called something like Far East Sheen.

And that’s why I don’t paint my nails.

P.S. A more curse-y version can be found on One Random B.

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