Show Me Your Nails 2.0

[Tamara76]

Due to some technical glitches with the original Show Me Your Nails Thread, I am starting a new thread with @vegchililover78's blessing (She says "hello," by the way!).

Please share your nail looks, nail art and manicures!

...And don't forget to check out @Beadshopgirl's Nail Stamping Thread for stamping inspiration! ❤️  

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Nailed-It/The-Nail-Stamping-Thread/m-p/3328865

[RGbrown]

@WinglessOne 

Ahhhhhhh, this is amazing! I love all of your experimenting...it's nice to have a better idea of ways to approach this one, especially since I'm not super versed in magnetics to begin with, and seemingly have no patience with them 😅 I am glad to see you corroborate that one thin coat was basically useless, as that probably would have been where I started again next time, dropping me straight into frustration once more.  

Alternate theory on adding thinner:

Thick, gloopy polishes take forever to dry, but thinner evaporates almost immediately, and thinning down a thick polish can sometimes help speed the drying process along by allowing the solvents trapped in the goop to escape easier. 

That said...I dunno if this one is in that particular category of "way too thick", so yup, it's certainly a good idea to test a little before thinning the whole bottle. Too thin, and I suspect all the magnetic particles will just fall out of suspension completely. 

I don't think there are a ton of magnetic holo toppers out there...I wonder if this is why? I recall another indie (KBshimmer maybe? Not 100% on that though) did one last holiday season, but wound up discounting it pretty heavily not long after release...turned out the magnetic holo they used did something unanticipated and undesirable after a few months...turned the base grey maybe? Something along the line of losing it's sparkle, at least.

[WinglessOne]

@RGbrown  I'm glad this was helpful! Yeah, one thin coat will hurt your feelings. I mean, you could try it... maybe my bottle of Eyegazer's thicker than usual, I dunno. Kinda doubt it, though. When I get a bottle of magnetic polish, I always test it with a magnet through the bottle to see how easy (or not) is is to pull/push a pattern. Eyegazer seemed okay, just a bit sluggish. That should've been my first clue. 

I think the only way to get this topper to hold a pattern without migrating/shifting is to keep the magnet over it until it dries enough to not move around anymore, which could be up to 20 minutes. But who has the patience to do that? For multiple nails? No thank you. I do worry that thinning this polish will exacerbate the problem, but I won't know for sure without testing, so... next time I'm feeling patient enough to work with Eyegazer, we'll see what happens. I forgot about thinner reducing the drying time of some polishes; that'll be interesting to watch for here. 

Now I'm trying to think of other magnetic toppers I've seen, let alone magnetic holo toppers, and I'm drawing a blank. Well wait, there are some magnetics that are meant to be used over a base color, like the Born Pretty magnetics... I have some of those. Most of them are too sheer on their own and do best over a black or otherwise dark base color. But they're easy to use and they hold patterns/designs very well. None of them are holo toppers, though. I'm also trying to remember the disastrous holiday topper you mentioned. That'll be one of those things I suddenly (finally) remember at 3 AM when I'm trying to fall asleep. 🤣 

[Samtian]

@WinglessOne um wow!!!!

[WinglessOne]

Thanks @Samtian  🙂 

[CookieGirl1]

@WinglessOne your pics AND your review is really helpful.  Slightly off-track but do you like using a ring magnet?  I only have a bar but I've wondered if I might like a ring.

[WinglessOne]

Thank you @CookieGirl1 ! I love using a ring magnet. I'm sometimes not fast enough with a bar magnet, which is why I sometimes set the bar up on a table in a way that I can quickly slide my finger under it (vs. holding the bar over the nail). I'm much faster with the ring because I can wear it on my thumb while painting each nail, making the magnet quickly accessible. I usually don't fully remove the ring: I just slide it a bit down my thumb and then hold it over whichever nail needs a magnet. 

You can get different effects from a ring magnet by holding it (not wearing it) flat over a nail, so the magnet faces out sideways. That'll push metal bits and create negative space curves. If you put a freshly painted nail inside the magnet, you'll get some interesting results, especially on longer nails. 

[CookieGirl1]

@WinglessOne thanks for the perspective!  Since I've never had one I'm just not sure but it might be worth a shot.

[blushes88]

Here’s mine

 

[Saradestin]

Beautiful bright pink mani+pedi @blushes88 ! 😍

[itsfi]

@blushes88, I love a bold and bright hot pink. This is gorgeous! 💗

[CookieGirl1]

@blushes88 hot pink never goes out of style!

[RGbrown]

@blushes88 

Ooohhh, hot pink is a great choice any time of year! Gorgeous 💗

[Titian06]

Oooo, nice color, @blushes88 ! 😍

[Mellmars1185]

@blushes88 Pretty pink 💗💓

[RGbrown]

I have a new nail supply place to review: NailWholesale dot com

I have a feeling this will get long, so I'll place my novel in a spoiler 😅

Want a TL,DR? Eh, not horrible, but not great either.

Spoiler

For fall stuff, I wanted MT, Orly, OPI, and maybe one CG Halloween. I had been considering adding some Essie too, from the summer Handmade With Love collection, but finding that anywhere was next to impossible (some shades seem to be Ulta exclusive? Or at least really hard to find), so I tossed that requirement out early on. 

Places I considered (and why I ruled them out):

🔹Beauty Zone (doesn't look like they are getting newer Orly stuff)
🔹NailSupplyInc (only have MT...no Orly, OPI, CG)

🔹Polish Pick (no Orly, and I knew I could build a large enough cart elsewhere to avoid paying for shipping. That $11 gets old)

🔹Beyond Polish (expensive compared to NW, and then shades I wanted started selling out)

🔹Sleek Nail (the most expensive of all I looked at; free shipping is nice for a couple of bottles, but the polish prices are practically retail, and that hurts my soul 😅)

NailWholesale had the combo of the best prices and everything I wanted, and free shipping at $100 was doable with a few fillers... they had plenty of older polishes I was interested in to make that threshold. 

I sat on my cart perhaps a bit longer than I should have...I kept waiting to see if CG Halloween would drop, but it never did, so I placed my order last Wednesday around 115 am. After the 10% discount they offer, my total was $96.xx with free shipping for 21 items. Nice! I used PayPal, and there was a weird message on the order confirmation screen that I wish I had taken a screenshot of, something like "PayPal orders are processed manually"...huh, what's that about...?

Thursday afternoon, I noticed CG Halloween *and* Essie fall (might have grabbed one or two of these if they had been available) on their site 🤦‍♀️

Friday afternoon, I get an email from PP saying I've got a $3.42 refund from NW, but it doesn't specify what for. I log in to PP and see that I have been charged $81.45 instead of $96, and then received that $3 back on top of that (so net $78.03). Ugh, what's missing??

I check my spam folder and see an email from NW that tells me 4 polishes are OOS and my revised invoice is attached. The missing 4 bring my total down to the $81 charged to PP, but there's no indication of why I got an additional $3.42 back. That's the total of one MT minus the 10%, so I work off the assumption it's one of those, but I have no idea which one...fingers crossed it's not the one from the fall collection that I want most.

Still no shipping notice though, and my order history on the site still says "awaiting payment $96.xx" at this point. I guess this is the "manual processing" mentioned when I checked out.

I assume they don't ship on the weekends, so I try not to get too antsy, but I check my order history probably a dozen times over the course of Sat/Sun and into Monday; it never changes from "awaiting payment $96.xx" even though they've clearly processed my payment. I scour their site looking for "orders normally ship in x days" but can't find anything, so I decide I'll be patient and give them a week before inquiring as to the shipping timeline. 

Wednesday afternoon (aka yesterday), still no change to my order status, and I still haven't received anything that tells me what the extra refund was for, so I send a polite email asking about the usual shipping timeline. 

Today I woke up to an email that tells me my order status has changed and my order has shipped, and when I check the tracking number, it tells me it was delivered today. Yay! Apparently it shipped on Monday, but no one updated my order status in their system.

Sadly, the one missing MT was indeed the one I wanted most from the fall collection, so I just placed an emergency (yes, this is an emergency, thank you 😅) order from Sleek Nail for it. And some of the missing 4 that I knew about earlier were "must haves" for me, so I've also got an order outstanding with HB Beauty Bar for them, because it was the only place I could find one of them in stock. Sigh. 

Shipping wise, it came USPS Priority, and was well packed in a box placed inside a non-descript bubble mailer. 

The mailer

Inside the mailer, there was a box for the single polishes and the set I ordered was bubble wrapped separately.

Inside the box, bottles were wrapped up into sets of three.

Everything unwrapped, nothing leaking or broken!

Overall...shipping was passably quick, and everything was securely packed. Communication wasn't great though, and I'm annoyed that I still wound up having to shop three places after thinking I got it all in one order. (And I haven't gotten a ship notice from HBBB for my Friday order, so it's still a bit up in the air whether I'll get everything or not...they're bad with inventory too, based on my last order from them...). I haven't crunched numbers yet, but I suspect I might have been better off cost-wise with a smaller order from Polish Pick and just picking up my must have Orlys elsewhere...but on the flip side, I also managed to get a few polishes I haven't seen elsewhere, so NW wasn't a complete bust...I'm not overly mad, and I won't rule them out as a place to shop in the future, but I will greatly lower my expectations and perhaps not use them for "omg, I have to have that one" polishes again. 

[Saradestin]

Wow! That was quite an ordeal @RGbrown ! It is disappointing when you don’t get any information about the status of your order, specially when it is modified. But your polishes look gorgeous! 😍😍

[RGbrown]

@Saradestin 

Yeah, it was a little underwhelming, but thankfully I still got some great goodies to play with! ❣️

[Mellmars1185]

@RGbrown That sounds really confusing. The good thing is your have your polishes now! Have you ever ordered from that place before?

[RGbrown]

@Mellmars1185 

Nope, it's a new place for me! I couldn't find everything I wanted at a price I was willing to pay at any of my usual places, so I decided to poke around and see where I could attempt to get everything at once. It kinda backfired, but overall I'm still happy I got a few things I couldn't find elsewhere. It could have been much worse I suppose, so all in all, I'm mostly ok with how it went 🤷‍♀️

[Titian06]

I'm sorry to hear about your issues, @RGbrown ! 😖  I'm still waiting for my Orly direct order from Labor Day weekend. 🤣  They sent an email to me out of the blue with a code for $10 off my next purchase for the inconvenience of my delayed order.  I wasn't expecting that!  I hope you enjoy all your new colors!  They look pretty! 💖💖💖

[RGbrown]

@Titian06 

Eek, still waiting on a Labor Day order? Yuck! I wouldn't expect that from Orly, but the $10 code is a nice bonus!!