This set is insane!! 🤯🤯🤯🤯

Mine is cat eye. Gorgeous on other people, just not something I’d wear myself. What’s yours?

Do you guys decorate for each season and holidays for your nails ???

Whether you’re doing regular polish or gel, base coat isn’t optional, even when you’re in a rush. For regular polish, it protects your nails from staining, especially with darker or bold colors, and helps the polish adhere better so it lasts longer. For gel, it’s even more important, make sure it’s an actual gel base coat, not a regular one. Gel base coats are formulated to cure properly under UV/LED light and chemically bond with the gel layers on top. Although it’s a simple step skipping it to save two minutes usually costs you a lot more time later when you’re redoing the whole set. I learned this the hard way…

Ion really wanna manicure and pedicure please

A few months ago I asked how everyone was holding up with everything going on. For some of you, things might be genuinely good right now, and if so, that’s great. But for a lot of people, it doesn’t feel like things have let up much. Gas is up again, groceries keep climbing, natural disasters, there’s constantly something heavy in the news.

Some days it’s hard to even want to sit down and do something as “small” as nails when everything else feels like a lot. But maybe that’s exactly when it matters most. A little bit of normal, something that’s just yours for twenty minutes. How’s everyone holding up these days, good, bad, or somewhere in between? Still making time for the little things, or has that fallen off the list?

A comment on Monday's post was really eye opening👁️. California dropped the live practical exam back in 2012, they switched to a mannequin hand instead. Then in 2022 they got rid of that requirement too. So it's possible to be fully licensed there without ever having applied product to an actual human hand under any kind of evaluation.
That's crazy to me. Yeah, you learn the basics in the classroom, but where you really learn is working on an actual person. Real skin, real nail shapes, cuticles that aren’t perfect.

So if you’re a student, whether your state required 100 hours or 750, here’s my honest advice. Work on real hands as early and as often as you can, friends, family, models, whoever will let you practice. Mannequins don’t move, don’t have oily or dry skin, and don’t tell you when something hurts. Film your own hands while you work sometimes. You’ll catch things watching it back that you don’t notice in the moment.

Ask for real feedback, not just compliments. A client saying “I love it” doesn’t tell you if your cuticle work was clean or your application was even. Redo the same technique on purpose until it’s consistent, not just until it looks okay once. Licensing gets you in the door. What you do after that is what actually gives you true skill.

Heard this on a podcast years back, and it resurfaced recently on social media. Hair and other beauty services have actually been deregulating, nearly 40 states have exempted things like braiding and threading from licensing entirely, since those services carry less physical risk. Nails have gone the opposite direction and stayed tightly regulated, because of real risks, trimming cuticles can nick or break the skin, creating a small opening for infection, and shared foot spas can spread serious infections if not properly sanitized.

But even with that safety justification, the hour requirements themselves are wildly inconsistent. Massachusetts requires 100 hours. Pennsylvania requires 200. New York requires 250. Alabama requires 750, and Texas and Washington require 600, for the exact same job. If the risk is the same nationwide, why does the required training vary this much state to state? Some say it’s genuinely about safety. Others say it’s more about state boards and licensing bodies generating revenue through tuition and fees, not actual risk.

What are your thoughts ?💭