My First Ever Set of Acrylic Nails

The finished set!

Ever since I started my wee business people have asked if I could do acrylics. I always thought I would just be happy painting people's natural nails or selling them false ones but now that NAILS NAILS NAILS have pretty much taken over my life and are becoming much more of a full time thing, I thought it would be a really good idea to learn how to do acrylics.

I signed up for a Beginners Acrylic course with Nailzone Beauty School in Glasgow. I'd heard really good things about them and although the course seemed expensive at £350, I was able to apply for £200 funding from ILA Scotland (I don't know if England have something similar?). The price also covers a full kit to take home and it's packed into two, 6hour days rather than 10 weeks of two hour classes 40 miles away from where I am. 

I was really nervous on the day and didn't have a model until last minute (thank you Rhanna you wee star) but when I turned up the girl taking the class made us all feel really comfortable. The class was nice and small with six people and everyone was really nice. After a really informative Health and Safety lesson, we were given a demonstration and introduced to our kits. I was pretty glad to see that everything was pink!

Our first lesson was applying natural tips and the first step was preparing the nail by pushing the cuticles back and filing the nails short. I had a bit of a hard time pushing back the true cuticles but after realising I wasn't hurting my model and changing from an orange stick to a metal pusher I got the hang of it! After buffing and dehydrating the nails, we measured up the nail tips and glued them on. I was quite proud of myself because I only had one that was a bit too small but the rest were spot on. Next we prepared the tips, glued them on and blended the smile lines a bit more. Cutting the tips down to size sounded easy but I kept forgetting to hold the tips so they were pinging about everywhere and I kept touching the nail, which is pretty much a SIN when you're applying acrylics because you're transferring the natural oils from your fingers back on to theirs after you just spent all that time getting rid of it.

After a quick lunch to pizza hut we came back and watched a demonstration on acrylic application, our tutor made it look so easy but I knew I would find it hard! By the time I was on my model's second hand I thought I was doing pretty well but I wasn't applying enough acrylic so they were pretty thin and looked flat from the side instead of having a natural curve. This was fixed by just applying more to the middle of the nail (the apex) and the tip (the free edge) and they looked much better! After the nails were dry we were shown how to buff them up nice and shiny. WELL I WAS TERRIBLE! I was honestly buffing for like an hour. There's a knack to it and I just couldn't get the hang of it, thankfully, on my last nail I finally got it so I went back and re-did the nails, shined them up, popped a bit of cuticle oil on and there they were. My first ever set of acrylic nails! The shaping is a bit off but I'll get there in the end.

Still need a lot of practise! But they look ok for a first try!

I'll let you know how I get on next week. I'm doing french tips and apparently they're quite hard, arrrghhh! My friend is coming over soon and letting me practice on her, I'm scared!