Caviar French Tips

I’ve got some cool nails for you today as part of the Nail Art Challenge!  The theme for day 23 is CAVIAR NAILS and I’m using some Nail Pearls made by Pretty Woman.   They were $7.99 at Rite Aid which seems to be a bit cheaper than other micro-beads on the market.  This little bottle of Nail Pearls has A LOT in it.  I don’t see myself running out anytime soon!

Before I posted this I did a quick google search to refresh my memory on whether or not I could use the term CAVIAR in my post.  If you have been blogging, or reading blogs for a while, then you may be familiar with all the drama surrounding the coined term ‘Caviar Manicure’.  If you’d like to read more about last year’s Caviar debate- then here’s a good summary posted by The PolishAholic.  When this debate went down I thought, “who is this Ciaté company, and why are they being such jerks?”.  A year has passed, now I’m a blogger, I’m more familiar with their products, and I still don’t own any Ciaté stuff.  HA!  Take that caviar and eat it, Ciaté!

Moving on to my non-Ciaté caviar nails mani!  I wanted to try something different… so I decided just to cover my tips with the micro-beads.  I have been lucky lately, I have had no nail breaks, my tips are all long, and they’re all the same length- so I might as well do this caviar french manicure while my luscious nails are in tact.  Geesh, I hope I didn’t just jinx myself!!

To start out I painted my nails with a sheer french manicure color from Sally Hansen and I waited for like ever for it to dry.  Then I had to figure out a way to get the caviar on just my tips… but I really wanted a clean, straight line.  So I used rubberbands!  I stretched a rubberband across my nail and kinda held it taught with my thumb and neighboring finger.  Then I applied my basecoat to just the tip and tried not to touch the clearcoat to the rubberband.  Then I poured the nail pearls over the basecoat.  A lot stuck, but there were still some bald spots… so I dunked my tip in to a shotglass with nail pearls in it and kinda smushed my finger down into the pearls to really get them to stick.  The rubberband worked as a nice little shelf that the beads could push up against to form a straight line.  When I released the rubberband I used a dotting tool to re-position any of the pearls that weren’t straight.  The instructions said after 20 seconds to push down on the pearls- so I did that too.  After a few minutes the basecoat dried and my pearls were stuck on better than expected.  The rubberband thing worked pretty well!  As you can see, I got a nice clean line of beads!  Hopefully sometime soon I can post more about all the other wonderful nail art uses for rubberbands. 😀

I quickly took some pics and even though my nails were cute and the pearls were secured well enough, I couldn’t wait to get them off!  If I left them on… I envisioned myself leaving little little trails of pearls every where I went.  Like a modern day Hansel and Gretel.  LOL!  I’d like to try it again sometime… but I just wasn’t feelin it today.

What’s your opinion on caviar manicures?