6 August 2012

Nail Files: Bare All Tag

I saw a post on Painted Nails & Baking Scales about the Nail Files: Bare All tag and I've been saving the idea for a dry spell on the blog (which I've hit already thanks to the Olympics!) so today you get to see my nails in their birthday suit.


That's my nails fresh from a polish removal session. My cuticles were growing out, I had a few hangnails and most of my nails needed a reshape. I've been biting the sides of my fingers again too :(


Here they are after some cuticle work and a bit of TLC. Still in rough condition, so I need to stop stress biting soon. Filing into the correct shape is getting easier but my main challenge has been learning to file into a shape that matches the nail bed, not the white tips. Before I was wearing polish every day, I thought it looked weird not to follow the white tip shape, but it made my painted nails look odd. Everyone has to learn sometime, right?

I don't have perfect hands and nails by any means, but I'm lucky to have strong nails that grow well. I don't have the longest nail beds but I like the way they look, whether they're mid-length like this or down to the fingertips, so I'm lucky in that way too.

There's some staining going on, which I think is the beginning of what I hear is the polish addicts' curse - go without polish long enough to get rid of the stains (gasp, the horror), or maintain the stains by wearing polish to cover them. What a dilemma...I know what my solution will be!


There are some of my manicure things. I forgot to add the hand cream I mention below and the Boots Expert Nail Strength Solution that I use *facepalm* but there we go.

The Nail Files: Bare All Tag rules/questions:
  • Include a photo of your clean, product free, natural nails: see above for before and after shots!
  • Preferred length:  Short to Mid, because some of my nails spoon when they grow too long - the first picture above is as long as I let them get.
  • Preferred shape: Squoval, but sometimes they lean towards square by accident.
  • Favorite base coat:  Orly Bonder, but I haven't tried any other big-name basecoats yet.
  • Favorite top coat:  Seche Vite but again, I haven't tried any other well-known ones (recommendations for either, that I can pick up in UK for £10 or under, are welcome!)
  • Favorite cuticle cream/oil:  Burt's Bees Lemon Cuticle Cream
  • Favorite hand cream:  Ahava Dead Sea Water Mineral Hand Cream, which was a gift but can be bought from www.ahava.co.uk
  • Favorite nail clippers:  I use Boots ones if I'm taking off more than a couple of millimetres, otherwise I file them down a little.
  • Favorite nail file:  At the moment I'm using a large emery board, from Boots I think! Coveting a glass file having heard good things about them.
  • Favorite remover:  Cutex removers so far.
  • Self or professional manicure:  I do my own but try and go for a professional full manicure a few times a year.
  • How often do you polish:  It depends on how much free time I have. Since I started blogging, it's been about twice a week but the urge is growing to do it more often. I don't always have good light for manicures and end up removing them later without ever having photographed them, so I'm hopefully making a DIY lightbox this weekend to fix that.
  • Most wanted nail product: At the moment, it's the new gold flakes topcoat that Zoya released a picture of!
  • Be sure to include the nail files bare all tag in your post/video response

I'd love to see some of your bare nails - leave a link to your bare nails post in the comments if you make one and I'll edit them into the article :)

Thanks for the post idea, Lou!

6 comments:

  1. I love these posts, guess its the inquisitiveness in me wanting to see whats under the polish!

    Thanks for the link and the tag!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're welcome! For me, it was actually quite interesting to look at them properly rather than repaint them straight away :)

      Delete
  2. Your nails are so pretty! I actually have a post coming up on Tuesday that shows my bare nails. Even though you bite your fingers they still look better than mine and I don't bite! Yikes!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Aw, thank you! Your nails don't look bad at all though, we just need to give them a bit more TLC ;)

      Delete
  3. The No.7 Top Coat from Boots is great, very shiny and almost as fast-drying as Seche! And with their regular £5 off coupons, I got mine for only £2!! x

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ooo, thanks for the tip! I don't know why I hadn't thought of that plan.

      Delete

Thanks for leaving a comment, I love to see them and will reply to all of you! Comments with links will be removed so please email me instead if you'd like me to visit your blog :)