L'Oreal Star Magnet

I saw this on some beauty blog AGES ago (so alas I can't link) and was determined to get it, so I searched high and low (ie, ebay) to find it. Annoyingly it only comes in this red colour or a navy-ish blue. The basic premise of it is that you paint it on, then hold a magnet (that comes with the polish) over the wet paint, which causes metal bits in it to arrange themselves into a star shape.

 




It's pretty cool but it is SO HARD to do the magnet thing!! You have to hold the magnet riiight over the nail, and keep it totally still for 30 seconds or so. The biggest problem I found was that the polish draws itself upwards to the magnet and sticks to it like some lame cousin of the T1000 from Terminator 2.

 







All in all, it's a nice novelty, but it's very hard to do well, and even when you do do it well, it's too subtle to really wow anyone, so what's the point in all that effort

How to disguise non-infilled acrylic nails.

I enjoy having super strong fake acrylic nails. I don't have them all the time, I usually only get them done for special occasions (which costs around £20-£30) and then upkeep them for a little while until I get bored of them, or they fall off.

As they grow out, the acrylic on the nail moves along the nail where it's glued on to the real nail, leaving a kind of ridge. After a few weeks of neglect, they really start to show up, especially if you have any kind of pearlescent or shiny nail polish on.

The reason I'm saying all this is as a prelude to my mega top tip of the day... how to disguise non-infilled acrylic nails.

The secret is... Use a glittery nail varnish! The specks of glitter refract the light in such a way as to fool the eye into not realising there's an ugly ridge there... the larger the glitter specks, the better.

So here are my nails after about two or three (or more? Not sure :/) weeks of not being infilled. Pretty noticeable gap there...




(this polish is Sally Hansen Maximum Growth in 'Profound Pink' (which looks lovely on nicer nails))

So I cleaned all that off, and painted them with one coat of MAC's Gee Whiz:


 

Then I put a coat of Barry M Red Glitter over that, and a coat of clear dry-through top coat.

Glitter nailpolishes annoyingly tend to need about a million coats of clear on top of them to get a smooth surface, so I would usually do more than just one, but I couldn't be bothered today. One of the reasons I put the 'Gee Whiz' on beforehand was so I only had to do one coat of glitter. The Barry M glitter polishes are super dense and you can get a perfect look just using them on their own, but then you'd have to spend even more time putting on top coat to get smooth nails (boring).


 

 So there you have it- how to cover up acrylic re-growth nail ridges without paying to get them in-filled.



I hope this was useful to you! This would also work for people who have super ridgey nails that they wanted to cover up perhaps...

Coming another time, a rant about how impossible glitter nail polish is to get off!