Dashing Diva Gloss: Ultra Shine Gel Palette
Now listen. If you told me last year that I’d be looking at nail stickers, let alone wearing them, I would have laughed in your face. To me, nail strip stickers remind me of pyramid schemes and one sad lunch break where I tried nail strips for the first time and hated them. But here we are! It’s 2022, baby, and I royally fucked up my nail beds in December from cycling through too many sets of press-ons in too short a time. I need something that’s flexible, thicker than just polish, and not adhered to my poor nails with superglue.
These nail stickers were something I threw in my cart to hit a free shipping cap around Halloween and they’ve been rattling around in the back of my nail drawer ever since. I didn’t expect to be writing about them so I didn’t take as many photos as my other posts here but here’s what we’ve got.
This kit had a total of 32 strips in SEVEN designs. Seven! That’s so many! How many different sizes were there? What sizes did I wear? I have absolutely no idea — they’re not numbered and I didn’t pay attention. The stickers are on flexible plastic sheets so you just kinda wrap the sheet around your nail to figure out which one fits best.
Don’t be fooled by the box — these aren’t gel in the “gel polish” sense. They’re essentially vinyl stickers! They have a bit of stretch, a super shiny finish, and a TON of stick. (But not as much stick as superglue because they don’t rip layers of your nail away when you peel them off.) Make sure you trim them to fit around your cuticles if you have irregularly shaped nail plates because it’s very obvious if the sticker is stuck over your cuticle. To get a smooth edge on the tip of my nails, I used the file that came in the kit to roughly cut the sticker down to the shape of my nail and then cleaned up the raggedy edge with a nail clipper.
It’s also really important to keep your expectations at rock bottom for stickers like this. I expected like 12 hours of wear before they all peeled off. Here we are, two and a half days in, and I’m only seeing very minor lifting around the cuticle of two or three nails. I didn’t use glue or a top coat or anything, I literally just washed my hands and then stuck the dang things on.
While my nails are growing out from the trauma caused by me being really excited about Christmas nails, I’ll totally be wearing more stickers like this. Fuck it, right?
Happy new year, y’all.
