Over the weekend, I took off my soft gel nails and mentally prepared myself to use nail forms yet again. I had decided on doing acrylic nails but didn’t get around to finding the right nail tips. Tips here are too expensive and it’s really hard to find nice half-cover clear tips with a curve. Anyway, nail forms don’t take that much longer, but they’re more demanding. 💅

I tried making them thin because of the actual color and glitter acrylic I had to put on next. See, if I was using nail tips I could’ve skipped the first layer of clear acrylic. Removing the old nails then putting these on took around 2 hours, but that was spent over the course of a day lol. I had a lot of filing to do but luckily I have my trusty drill. It still took a while.

The pink part is glow in the dark. 👻 And the design in general is copy of last year’s birthday nails I requested at a salon. This design is pretty easy to do. Roughly do an ombre from the tips 3/4 toward to the cuticles, then you can hide the line of demarcation (if any) with clear glitter acrylic going 3/4 toward the tips.

The whole color/glitter and stones part took another 2 hours, give or take… I really need to practice more. I bought Valentino acrylic, which a lot of people really seem to like. But as a hobbyist, I’ll get the perfect bead sometimes, but more times than not get ones that are too wet or slightly too dry. 😅 I also failed at getting nail glue when I was rushing around the city sweating after work last week. To stick the stones on, I used some icing gel, which is hopefully stronger than regular builder or clear gel. It’s hard to type, ngl, but I can manage. Holding chopsticks is also hard because of the chunky stones…

Hopefully these last a good 3 weeks without much lifting.

Other than that, I’m still not sure what to do with my hair. Keep doing the twist outs or commit to spending a whole day doing box braids. I don’t even know if I have enough left over kanekalon. It might have to wait until I change these nails because that would be a nightmare with the strands getting caught constantly.

Oh yeah, Osaka’s World Expo is happening in 2025… For a while now, the totally normal official mascot has been inescapable. It’s giving “happy metastasis!” 🧬