The Work

Officially, I'm employed as a busybody in the casino.

Practically, I'm the busybody at the nail studio. Which means I do dishes, clean a bit, fetch drinks, check the planner, organise gels and answer the phone with 'Nail Studio, please hold' as I sprint to someone better on the phone as me.

I also practice nails.

I've done some crude 3D nail art, which everyone thought was cute. My tips have been stolen by someone more in need of them. I've scrounged up more.

At least one storage room has been cleared out by I., uncovering many, many treasures.

And I work on people.

Now, don't get excited. I've done two customers so far, because S. got sick and the schedule went totally wonky. I. was working on a customer, J. was working on a customer, and J.'s actual customer was waiting. I'd just fixed one customer's single nail. I remembered the woman as being a nice customer, with understanding for my learning status.

Then J. just said 'Here's some liner, you finish this customer'.

I had never worked with liner before. I tried for ten minutes before giving up and finishing with gel. It was still slow going, but there was actual going involved rather than just sliding aimlessly across the nail. Liner is the work of Satan, I've decided. But I got the ten nails done eventually, and either they held or the customer isn't risking coming back until she's sure I won't be doing her nails again. Since there have been no angry phone calls involving me, I'm guessing the first.

My other working on people is basically J. I find a pattern on her iPad, which has a great many patterns of varying difficulty, and I do five nails in that pattern. I've done two patterns of the iPad so far. One was three weeks ago, and lots of people loved it. The other was this afternoon, and I'm not sure if J. is putting it onto Facebook. I get the feeling I could have done better on some parts, but then again, I was using the 17 euro brush, with which I'd had a grand total of one hour's practice.

In my opinion, if you sell a brush called a swirl brush and demand more than ten euros for it, it either has to be easy to maintain or self-swirling. The brush is extremely hard to clean, can only be used for one color, one specific type of paint (liquid air brush paint), is relatively fragile on the brush part, messy to work with and has a steep learning curve if you want to do crazy things like move over curved surfaces, paint curvy designs or want a perfectly even line. Oh, and since it's air brush paint, you usually have to apply the same line twice.

The pattern was all circles and curves. Circles are easy, once you get a hold of them, but curves are not. I'd prepped the colorwork underneath last Friday and left the swirling for today. J. and I had even discussed on how to do the swirls. There's the swirl tool which goes for about one millimeter before demanding more gel. Or the thin brush, which hates anything that isn't straight. There's liner, which I can't work with. There's stamps, but not in our shape. You can, technically, use some pens on gel nails, but sealing it is hard. Which left the swirl brush.

If you can use a swirl brush, curves are only as much of a pain as using, say, a calligraphy pen is. The strokes aren't unlike Asian calligraphy, even. But it's sensitive to pressure, levelness of both brush and surface, movement and if the cleaner on the gel has evaporated or not.

So when I was done and J. told me I'd be doing her other hand soon, I hoped she was kidding.

She wasn't. We looked through the iPad, but there was nothing inspiring there. There's only so much crayola bright dots and glittery white you can plonk on a grown woman's fingernails before she looks desperate to cling to the first half of her life. J. wanted sophistication, and I, quite frankly, wanted to use the season gels, meant for autumn, to make Christmas nails.

We went back and forth a bit, until J. basically let me do as I pleased.

Now, last week, I was on a stamping spree. I didn't stamp much myself in a permanent kind of way. Creatively, I was very much in a non-stamping kind of zone.

I'd cleaned the stamping plates, because not everyone cleans the top of them and almost no one thinks to clean the bottoms full of wet stamping polish. Note to the general population: inhaling nail polish remover through the mouth for fifteen minutes is not a good plan.

Then J. asked me to find some silver polish. There were six bottles of silver, one gold and then there was light blue, which you can play off as light grey with the right underground. I tested them all. It took too long for the customer to get any benefit from it, but I discovered that the metallic colors, mostly, sucked.

Five bottles of silver were called 'sterling silver'. They showed up the same way steam shows up. It's visible, but it does little to hide what's behind it.

The gold did even less.

The blue, on white, was very blue.

And one was called 'silber' and actually worked. I demonstrated the difference to J. on a dark underground. She was alone in the studio and promptly stole the bottle for herself.

So I finally came to the conclusion I wanted to do a french manicure in mature dark green and deep red, with a subtle shimmer, with a silver stamp on it. Because in about one week, customers are going to want christmassy. Some of them have already started, the weirdoes. I took one of the big stamping plates, looked around them, and went for a tip pattern rather than snowflakes or christmas trees or little angel wings or stars. The nails were done in about an hour and half.

Most of it was spent filing off my first design, because I'd tried to put the design under building gel, which, admittedly, last longer, but takes ages to file off. In the end, I had to use the power-file.

Stamping, for once, went swimmingly. I didn't have to redo every nail five times. There were a few false starts with the new stamping tool (another gift of the antichrist, quickly replaced by the old one), getting the right amount of polish on the plate and then getting it on without smudging, but after that, it went great. Sealed it and voilà! Done.

J.'s right hand looks like it was stolen off a tween. But her left... Her left looks classy. Not too christmassy for November, but definitely pointing out that the festive season is coming.