Sally Hansen Salon Effects in Ghoulie Girl

 In my post for Spun for You I mentioned that I wasn't completely sold on the Salon Effects, even though I had a positive experience with those strips. The reason I wasn't completely on board was because of the strips I am about to show you today. This design was the second design I was most excited for during the promo pictures and was happy when I was able to pick these up along with the spiderweb strips. Sadly, I wasn't at all thrilled with them.

 I love how the design looks in pictures and I did receive several compliments, but to me they weren't a home run. I am not knocking on the design or the strips because I think that I might have been partly to blame on that. When I applied the Spun for You strips I had a few minuscule gaps on the sides of my nails with certain fingers, so I decided that this time around I would just use a bigger size to get, what I thought, a better fit. Well, that might not have been the best idea. I found that working with a strip that was slightly bigger than your nail was a lot more difficult to handle than a strip slightly smaller than your nail. I had problems smoothing downthe strip all around the edges of my nails, since the bigger strips were excessive and kept wanting to bunch up. In order to correct this I had to do a lot of stretching, which then affected the design. It wasn't too noticeable, but it didn't make me a happy camper. Plus, I had to do cleanup to remove the excess portions of the strips.

  The overall time it takes to put on the Salon Effects for me has been five to ten minutes from start to finish. I love that. There is no cleanup involved, if done correctly, and you get a great looking design once you're done and the removal process is extremely fast. I have heard of people complaining about the sticky residue that is left on the nail after removal, but I have not had that issue.

 One thing I do want to warn you about, is that you definitely do need a topcoat to prevent chipping on these strips. When I wore Spun for You, I was impressed at the wear of the strips. I used my nails for everything and at the end of five days I ended up taking them off. Not because they were chipped, but because I was ready for a new manicure. They did show a bit of wear on the sides of the tip of my nails, but I think that was because of how I used my nails and the fact that they were quite long. The reason I mention all this is because I thought that I would try to give the strips a go without any topcoat and this is what ended up happening in less than 30 minutes:

My middle finger chipped and some of the strips on the other nails were beginning to lift. I am super grateful to Sally Hansen for including more than just ten strips in the box, which, by the way this box had no missing strips. I wasn't going to walk around with a freshly done manicure and a huge chip on it, so I just used one of the extra strips to replace the chipped one.

Here they are all nicely finished and topcoated with Seche Vite.

 Going along with my top coat warning, I want to add that using Seche Vite alone will cause the lifting I had in my Spun for You manicure and as well cause shrinkage at the cuticle. You can easily fix the lifting by pooling a bit of acetone at the cuticle once Seche Vite has dried and then lightly pat the strip down once most of the acetone has evaporated. You have to wait for the acetone to evaporate to prevent smudging on the design. I didn't notice the shrinkage on the Spun for You design because I placed the strips a bit too close to the cuticle, so when the shrinkage happened it looked perfect. If you want to prevent shrinkage you can use a topcoat under Seche Vite to protect direct contact with the strips. Also, using Sally Hansen's Inst- Dri in the red bottle will not protect the strips. I used this on my left hand and also had some minor chipping before I topcoated it with Seche Vite. I hope to be able to post a picture tutorial on how to apply salon effect strips by next week, with another design, and I will include more tips as well as how to get two uses out of one box of salon effects. ^_^

Sally Hansen Salon Effects in Spun for You

 When I first saw the promo pics for the Sally Hansen Salon Effects for Halloween I was pretty stoked and I was determined to buy them all as soon as they came out. Yea, in a perfect world I would have bought them all at once but the prices of 9.79 at CVS to 8.50 at Wal Mart for one use is a little steep. In fact, I have never before tried them because of the price. You could pretty much buy a bottle of polish that you will get multiple uses out of rather than just one manicure. However, these were special enough, in my opinion, that I decided they were worth the money. The first two I bought were Spun for You and Ghoulie Girl and since have bought Hotwired and Numbskull, but I am still missing Wish Nets.

 I apologize beforehand as this will be a lengthy post, since this is also my review on the nail polish strips. I really had no idea on how to begin to apply, so I did read the instructions. The instructions state to start with clean, dry nails and they include a nail file and orange stick to give yourself a quick manicure. They don't say to apply base coat or top coat. They do, however, stress to be sure your nails have no excess dirt or oils to have your manicure last longer. I have to agree. I applied these after a swatch-a-thon and I was continually moisturizing my cuticles with Qtica cuticle balm, which moisturizes all too well. I swiped my hands with some pure acetone and then applied OPI Chip Skip to dry out my nail beds, BUT I didn't pay much attention to the side walls where the nail meets cuticle and that was a big mistake. The strips didn't want to adhere too well to those areas because of the excessive moisture.

 Peeling the strips from the backing and plastic in which they are encased, was relatively easy and I had no issues there. The issue I had was that on some of the strips I had to flip around to get the better part of the design. That might just be me though. I initially thought that all strips would be the same spider web design, and I was surprised when I saw that every single strip had a different design. To me the design looks best where the spider web is just beginning and I wanted to have that on my nails, not the part of the spider web that was towards the ends.

This is the picture after I finished placing all the strips.

Little tip here. Don't pull too hard on the strips when adjusting them. In fact, this design hardly needed any stretching to conform to my nail. You can see here on my index finger how I had a tear because I was too rough with them. It wasn't noticeable in real life but we all know how macro tends to exaggerate!

Sorry for the lighting here, but I noticed this lifting when I was watching tv and I had my camera with me. The strips don't say to apply top coat, but the sides of the strips didn't want to adhere properly so I added a coat of Seche Vite. That fixed the problem with the sides of my nails, but I had no idea there would be lifting at the cuticle with top coat.

Here's another pic showing how the main ones lifting at the cuticle were my index and ring finger. Now, I had already applied topcoat and didn't want to add another because I had no idea if that would fix it or not. The strips at the end of the cuticles were pretty hardened with the Seche Vite and didn't think another coat of top coat would work, so I improvised.

I used acetone. I used my elf concealer clean up brush and loaded it with a bit of acetone and just let it flow along my cuticle without touching the actual strips. Once, the acetone had mostly evaporated, I used the brush to lightly pat down the strip around the cuticles. That worked great for me and didn't remove any of the polish strips.Yup, macro here is over exaggerating again. The gap is not that huge in real life.

See, the gap at the cuticle is barely noticeable.

Can't even tell I have a gap in this one either!!

 I have only tried two of the design so far, including this one, and I'm not too convinced. Don't get me wrong I LOVED these strips and thought the design was well worth the price, but Ghoulie Girl was a little disappointing for me. Also, the package comes with 16 strips to ensure you get the best possible fit for your nails, but mine only came with 14. Not such a big deal, but I wanted to save them to use as accent nails later. Well, I replied to Sally Hansen on Twitter and they gave me a number to call their customer service. I didn't exactly know what to expect when I called and thought maybe they would just give me a coupon for a few bucks off the price, but they actually offered to send me a new box! This was just this week and I still haven't received them, but if I do get them I will post in in my Hauls and Nail Mail page. Overall, I would advise you to buy the Spun for You design if you are interested in trying them, but I'm not convinced yet on the whole Salon Effects thing. Even if I don't receive the one Sally Hansen is supposed to be sending me, I will be buying this design again. ^_^