Good morning, Dear Reader!
Today I have something new to me to show you, Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips in Laced Up. If you recall, I tried Sephora by OPI's Chic Prints when they first came out and didn't love them, so despite hearing good things about the Sally Hansen strips, I was reluctant to try them until Sally Hansen offered to send some for review, which is where this pack came from. They're completely different than the Sephora ones, so I took a lot of pictures to show them to you.
The pattern is Laced Up, which is black lace over a neutral base. I did a manicure in black Konad over a neutral some time ago, and I thought it was okay, but my opinion of it was higher than the general opinion reflected in the comments (that's my delicate way of mentioning it was largely hated). I used Laced Up today because I wanted a very cool manicure for something later today but didn't feel like investing the effort in one. I took out the package of nail strips, unpacked everything in the box, and read the directions (to any gentlemen reading, that's the normal way to do it, the unpacking and direction reading).
The directions told me how to clean off my nails for application, recommending totally bare nails. I normally follow directions precisely the first time with a product, but here, that deviated from how I would reasonably use it so I changed it up a little bit (this is not the normal way to do it). I chose them because I feel lazy and didn't take off yesterday's manicure, so I took out two isopropyl alcohol pads and used the first to clean the day old polish on each nail of my left hand and set the second aside for my right. Then I got about the business of applying the nail strips.
The most significant difference between these and the Chic Prints is that these are made out of nail polish while the Sephora ones I tried were some kind of plastic, like decals. With the decals, I struggled with wrinkles over the natural curves of my nails, with that being the biggest disadvantage to them, and these didn't cause any trouble at all. Since these are polish, they're super-sealed in the packaging, being sandwiched between two layers of plastic. I took pictures of the steps as well as I could using a leftover because by the time I did the second hand, each nail was taking well under a minute to complete, so this is really easy and I wanted to show you how easy. This is the the strip as it comes out of the package.
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strip |
The top layer is a thin but strong plastic film that gets peeled off from the blue tab. I mention it's strong because there were no problems with tearing it. I forgot this step with one, which messed up the nail a little because some of the polish strip came off when I managed to peel the plastic off, but I was able to save it (I'll get to how when we look at that picture). This is peeling off the plastic.
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effect Nail Polish Strips, Plastic Peeled |
The next step is removing the polish strip from the backing
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effect Nail Polish Strips, Peeling Strip |
Then I took off the little tab, and this is what's applied.
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips, Ready to Apply |
To apply, I chose which end better fit my cuticle and touched the strip down centered at the cuticle, slightly stretched it to the center of the tip of my nail, then stretched each side as I pressed it down. It's the stretchiness of these that's very cool - it lets the strip really take the shape of a nail. I pressed down one side of my demo strip and stretched it to show you how elastic these are. Here, you can see how that came into play in fixing my error - it's at the cuticle of my thumb nail here, at the corner closer to the strip, that I pulled off a piece when I forgot to remove the top plastic layer and ripped up a bit of the strip when I got the plastic off my nail, so I tore off a little bit from the opposite end of the strip and covered the spot. The pattern is imperfect there as a result, but that's a handy trick.
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strip Stretched Out |
To finish, the directions told me to lightly file the end with an included file, but I found that while applying them that I could stretch it over the tip and my nail would cut the strip, so I just did that. My last step wasn't in the directions, which was finishing it with top coat, applied to each nail as soon as the strip application was finished. Here's my mani, which took under ten minutes from start to finish.
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| Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips in Laced Up |
I definitely like these a lot. The price varies pretty significantly since they're a drug store item that often goes on sale, and of course they're costlier than regular polish, but I think for instances like this, where I really want a cool manicure and it's just not going to happen with regular supplies, they're great. I'd also bring these along on a trip lasting several days since it worked to put them over an existing manicure and they're not a hassle to get through airport security. I've seen pictures of a pack that's a bright crazy flower pattern, and those are some that I really want to try now that I know how well they work.
I have a few more packs of these that were sent, so I'll show you more of them soon. Frankly, I can't believe that smacking something over another manicure worked out so well. I know it's not absolutely perfect and that if you try, you can see a few spots of the red at some edges in the picture, but the reality is that it's only in the moment that I'm taking the picture that it matters how a manicure looks in a macro picture. Knowing where to look, it takes a few seconds to identify the red on my hands looking at them, so I doubt anyone else would ever see it.
That's what I know about Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips, so until next time, love and nail polish to you!
All Rights Reserved, Siobhan@
The Nailphile. If you're reading this elsewhere, it's stolen from a real
nail polish blog.
hold your orders as I will be doing a promotion for Gelish once I am back. It will be worth the wait I promise. 
