UberChic Jet-Setting Holo Gel: Meet Me In Tahiti

***Note: This is not an affiliate post.  I will not earn any commission if you click through and make any purchases.

After roughly five years of saying "I don't want to use gel polish because I enjoy re-doing my nails every week," I have found myself at a place in life where I am SO HAPPY to be able to keep the same nails for 2 weeks or more!

Don't get me wrong, I'd still be doing my nails every week if I had the time.  But now that I work 40 hours a week, and (pre-COVID anyway) have a very busy social life, I just don't have the time or the energy for my nails that I used to.

So after my last post where I donned at-home gel polish for the first time ever, I decided I needed more gel polish.  ALL the gel polish, in fact!  But gel is expensive and I didn't work for the entire month of April, so I settled for a 5-piece collection by UberChic Beauty: Jet-Setting Holo, their summer 2020 collection.

I also snagged UberChic's gel base coat, their no-wipe top coat, and some regular stamping black & white polish.

I ended up wearing my first color, Meet Me In Tahiti, for a MONTH plus TWO DAYS.  And it stayed SO glossy!  I'm so, so happy and impressed with the longevity of this gel.  It never lost any shine, and it never once scratched, dented, cracked, peeled where my nails are peeling, or shrunk away from the edge!

The color, as you can see, is pretty much perfect for my life.  It matches roughly 45% of everything I own, including but not limited to my Switch Lite and third-party skin, my fave Snag Tights, and the shirt I was wearing the day I did my nails.

It even matches the label of my new favorite beer!  If you've never had Mas Agave, it's a gose-style ale that's aged in tequila barrels.  It tastes like a margarita in beer form.  And this year, Founders released a grapefruit variety!  It's so yummy.  Mark and I stocked up on two 4-packs each of both varieties and we've only managed to make them last through the whole stay-at-home order because we also keep getting White Claw and Dos Equis delivered with our groceries.

Anyway this isn't a beer blog - back to the nail polish!  It applied wonderfully - opaque in one coat! - but also a little awkwardly.  Since I'm so new to gel polish, I don't know if maybe all gel polish is thicker than I'm used to, or if mine was too cold after sitting on the doorstep for a few hours in 30-something degree weather.  (I didn't use it until the next day, so it had been sitting inside for roughly 24 hours.)  Because of the thickness, I wound up with a couple of thinner spots and a few bulges on my nail where the polish was laid on extra thick.  I don't think you can really see them, but I'm at least vaguely aware that they're there when I rub the surface of my nails.  (Which I did a lot.  Because I was obsessed with how smooth and sturdy they felt with the gel!)

The day I painted this mani was completely overcast, and because I no longer have a mani-cam light setup, I took the first set of photos using natural light diffused through the doorwall.  The holo effect didn't really show up, but there was a very nice sparkle to the polish.

A few days later, BOOM! the sun came out, and so did the holo sparkle that we all know and love!

(If it looks like there's a faint hint of an ombre going on in the above photo, that's because I got Extreme Blue oVertone under my nails when I dyed my hair that weekend, and it stained the undersides of my nails a little bit!  But it washed off after a few showers.)

I'm seriously SO obsessed with how long this lasted!  The photos above and below were taken at about the two week mark.  I didn't think to take more photos right before I removed it, because I did so at 9 pm on Memorial Day, but imagine exactly this except with another 3-5 millimeters of growth.  After just over a whole MONTH, the only reason you could tell it wasn't a fresh mani was because of all the visible growth at my cuticles.  And my nails felt so strong - indestructible, even.  I've probably mentioned on the blog a couple of times how my right-hand index and middle finger nails peel really badly, right?  The gel held my layers of nail together securely enough that I was FINALLY able to grow the peeling out!!!  I did cut all of the growth off so that I could nip the peeling in the bud once and for all.  Hopefully this will be the end of the peeling!

Meet Me In Tahiti was the perfect shade to transition into spring (and unwittingly into early summer).  I can't wait to try out the rest of the Jet-Setting Holo collection.  I've particularly got my eye on that beautiful coral Party In My Flip Flops.  Corals look really good on me, if I do say so myself! 😉

How have your nails been holding up during lockdown?  Have you done any at-home salon replacements, or are your nails suffering without those blessed nail techs?  Let me know in the comments!

The first blog post in a very, VERY long time

So, there's no brief way to summarize the last - what - two and a half years?! since my last post.  So much has been going on in my life and while I've still been doing my nails about once every week or two (sometimes three!), I have not had the time or the energy to blog about it.  Some of my nicer manis have made it to my Instagram, but I've even lost momentum on that account.

Until now!  My sales job at a pipe manufacturer/distributor company has been deemed essential to maintaining infrastructure, but I have not felt safe going in.  I won't bore you with the details but the short of it is simply that I'm taking a few weeks off to protect my physical and mental health, as well as that of my boyfriend.

The last two weeks have felt a lot like my life back when I was blogging actively: I can only communicate with my friends and family via the phone & internet, I'm not working, and I have very little motivation/need to leave the house.  Luckily ALL of the reasons for this situation are VERY different from my old life, but here I am all the same.

So it was pretty much a matter of time before I spent 2-3 hours on my nails, took proper photos adjusting the white balance and everything, and actually wrote a whole blog post about it!

This manicure was a whooooole ordeal, let me tell you.  It's way different from anything I've done before because - 

- it's gel!  And multichrome powder!

I used the gel base coat and top coat by ASP, sandwiched around Chick Pick Polish Neon Blue.  Can I just interject how much I LOVE this neon blue?  It has been an amazing base for several fantastic manicures.  It's truly neon on the first coat, but it needs at least two coats as it's pretty much a jelly.

I thought ahead and did my research before attempting this mani.  First, I learned that when you're putting a powder over regular polish, the polish needs to be dry to the touch, but not completely dry - still slightly smooshable.  Second, I learned that when putting gel top coat over regular polish, the polish needs to be COMPLETELY dry - no smooshing whatsoever.  These two facts, luckily, can be stacked since you can just let the regular polish keep drying for a bit after you rub in the powder.

So the layers on my nails, from bottom to top, are: gel base - regular polish - chrome powder - gel top.  I considered layering polish - gel top - powder - more gel top, but I thought that might be one layer too many.

I got this powder a million years ago - well before I stopped blogging - and never got around to using it because I didn't have any gel polish, a lamp, or a water-based polish top coat.  The cap says it's by Born Pretty Store, but sadly I have no memory of what the color name is.  I couldn't get a photo or video of the powder itself to show off what a GORGEOUS white base with purple, blue, and pink multichrome shifts it is.  But I promise you it is all of those things!

Guys.  This powder is SO. FINE.  I'm pretty sure it will never truly be gone from the shirt I was wearing or the floor around the table.  It's probably deeply embedded in my lungs and my nail brush, too.  But it's SO PRETTY that it's DEFINITELY worth the mess and effort!

Also, back to loving on this Chick Pick neon.  It. is. N E O N.  My lamp for the gel is LED, and look how this stuff G L O W S under the lights!  I wish I could go glow-bowling with this on!!

I MEAN.  This photo hasn't been edited AT ALL.  I put my phone on the auto setting and let it choose the white balance, shutter speed, etc to capture this amazing neon glowy goodness.  (Please don't ever do this with a bottle of gel polish!  This regular polish was safe under the lights, but I wouldn't want you to partially cure your gel polish through the bottle and ruin the whole thing just for a cool photo!)

I don't think this is a perfect powder application, but I would definitely say that it was at least mostly successful!  Some of my struggles were definitely a learner's curve; it could also be because powders work better on top of gel polish rather than regular; it could also be that this powder isn't the best quality, because I'm pretty sure I remember it only being a couple of bucks when powders usually run anywhere from $12 - $25.

There is no possible way that I will ever be able to do a full blog post for every manicure of mine in the last three years, but I will look through my pictures and find some of my favorites to share here!  After all, blogging kept me sane back when I had essentially nothing else going on in my life.  I'd like to honor that by blogging at least a little while the coronavirus pandemic has me cooped up at home!

What's on your nails right now?  Have you ever used a chrome, holo chrome, multichrome, or mermaid powder yourself?  Let me know in the comments!