Weekend Nails: Chevron and Shamrock Decals

Disclosure: Some items used in this post were provided to me for my honest review.

So I spent most of last week in Wisconsin, and it was COLD! This did no favors for my already parched nail beds, but when I came home to nail mail, I couldn't resist one more mani before I gave my nails a few days of much needed TLC.

In the packages were one item I ordered (a bottle of Julep Dakota) and one that was provided to me by Nailed It Decals to review some of their adorable St. Patrick's Day themed decals. While I have been wary of diving in to affiliate reviews, after taking a look at Nailed It's products, they seemed right up my alley. My litmus test, which Nailed It passed with flying colors, was "is this a product I would consider using anyway?" Here's what I came up with for my very first affiliate post:

There are two schools of decal that I've tried in the past: water decals and sticker style decals. While I've been fairly successful with both, I prefer sticker type decals because they are so incredibly easy. Lift, place, topcoat, done. These vinyl decals were very easy to apply and excellent quality-all around a good product. Chevrons have been a design I've been a little nervous about trying freehand, so these may have saved me from a potential polish disaster.

I started with the new Wet n' Wild basecoat (so far I like it!), then applied the polish- I used Dakota, a rose gold metallic, and A England Dragon, a stunning mossy green holo. Once it was dry-ish (which hurt my results a little, the instructions specifically say to wait until it's dry), I pulled off the decals I wanted, and used a pair of tweezers to place them. For the longer pieces, I found that nail clippers worked best for trimming them to size. The straight pieces were long enough to split in half and use one for both little fingers, and one chevron piece made up both of the stripes on my accent nail. I used the Julep cleanup tool to push down the edges of the decals, but an orangewood stick would have worked, too. After applying the decals, I put two coats of Mega Shine over the whole deal.

One thing that I didn't notice right away and loved was that each of the small images came in three different sizes. I have small nails, so having size options means I can do more looks with the same package. I'm really looking forward to playing with the rest of these decals!

You can pick these decals up for yourself here through the Nailed It Etsy shop. Be sure to use discount code SSNB20 for 20% off of your purchase (discount code can't be combined with any other offers).