Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips - with our instructional video!

Well, when I say instructional video, what I mean is it's a video with moi and Joanne trying to show you how we did this, not necessarily how it should be done!

So yes, Sally Hansen have brought the Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips to Ireland and we were really excited to get some to try out.  Their ethos is salon results at home, nice eh?  With the nail polish strips, you don't have to sit waiting for your nails to dry and they last up to ten days.  Eh sign me up!  We got Frock Star and Laced Up to try and of course, what one did you think we were going to try first eh?  Starts with G and ends in litter...

Left: Frock Star.  Right: Laced Up

So here's what you get in the box.  An instruction leaflet, a cuticle stick, a nail file and two packs of the nail polish strips.  Of course, we didn't have to open the two packs of strips, but we big fat did anyway to see what we had to work with, 16 strips to be exact.  I will be honest, we kinda looked at the instruction leaflet, thinking we were great and know what we were doing right away.  Kind of like when you get something from Ikea that needs assembly and think, ah here, this is easy!  Not so, so we used both the instruction leaflet and our own method to get the finished product.

The nail polish strips come in four different sizes so will pretty much work for most nail sizes.  Joanne has very slender fingers (bitch) and so needed the smallest ones and the next size up.  She found this out after making a mess of a couple of nails but what can you do.  Let's have a closer look at one of the strips.

Ooh isn't she pretty?  There's so many different coloured glitters of all shapes and sizes, making a really sparkley nail polish strip if I do say so myself.  So how does it work?  Take a look at our Stephen Spielberg-esque instructional video where we waffle and show you how we did it (without actually showing our faces and ignoring the near scrap we had beforehand trying to figure out how to work the strips!  Ah, sisterly love!) So be gentle and enjoy!

Did that help in any way, shape or form?

Here's my accent nail and I am in The Love with it.  It's pretty, full of densely packed glitter and blings up my manicure, which is Ciate's A Dangerous Affair.

Joanne had a bit of trouble with how fiddley the strips were at the start but as she went on, she got the hang of it.  The underneath side is really sticky and we lost the stickiness from one of the strips from sheer manhandling, so be dainty and delicate please.  When I was doing my nails, instead of filing the strip at the top of my nail, I pressed gently along the top and it broke off itself, much handier I thought.  Joanne's edges look a bit more rough than mine so give my method a go with one nail first and see how you get on.  And this way, you're pretty much guaranteed that there'll be no jagged edges and you'll definitely get the use of the other half of the strip on another nail. 

We topped the nail polish strips off with a coat of Seche Vite top coat and they truly look and feel like proper nail polish (basically because they are!)

I'm told you can remove them with nail polish remover and this will be the test for me.  We all know how much I hate trying to remove glitter polish.  If this comes off easily enough, then ladies, my life will be changed....  Stay tuned for that.

We would totally recommend these nail polish strips, they are absolutely gorgeous and if we get 10 days out of them, even better!  There are two more glitter shades available, Glitz Bitz and Blue Ice along with 6 patterned ones, Wild Child, Kitty Kitty, Girl Flower, Misbehaved, Laced Up and Check it Out.  They're €8.95 and available from selected pharmacies, department stores and grocery stores nationwide.  They'd make a great stocking stuffer or Kris Kindle present.

I will be honest, I wasn't sure I'd like these as much as I did.  This time last year, I tried out the Essence Studio Nails stickers and I hated them.  They just felt like stickers on my nails funnily enough!  But the Sally Hansen Nail Polish Strips are actual nail polish and feel normal on my nails.

We love these and can't wait to give Laced Up a go.  We are going to buy the other two glitter ones purely because we are magpies, girls and the sparklier anything is, the better.

Go get these ladies and give them a go and let us know how you get on.  If we can put these on, you can, we are clumsy eejits and in no way dainty, so bling up the nails, sure it's nearly Christmas!

**Update** - ladies, please listen to us when we say "read the box"!  I, Karen, went to put the rest of the strips on my remaining nails only to find out that they'd dried out, stickiness gone.  Doh.  I then decided that it was a good time to actually read the box where yeah, it said to discard any unused strips.... What had we done?  Taken them all out of the packaging to show ye what came in the box.  We should have used our little noggins, read the box and wrapped the remaining strips in cling film or nail polish.  There are two sets of strips per box, so open one at a time and waste not good readers!