However, it's not as bad when I paint my toes. Sure, it's still messy and smelly and sticky, but I can still do stuff at my computer or eat a snack while waiting for my toes to dry. Also, my mom has this rule that it's not proper to wear sandals unless your toenails are painting.
So today I gave into it. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I used a base coat, two coats of polish, and a top coat, letting each coat dry for 5 minutes. It took me just about a half hour to get everything painted, dried, and cleaned up. I was rather impressed with myself.
I have terrible dancer's feet and I try to make them look good, but at the end of the day, I'm usually just too lazy to care. But today I started off by smoothing and buffing my toenails using a smoother/buffer thing that I bought at the Dollar Tree.
After that, I applied my L.A. Colors Basecoat-Topcoat that I also bought at the Dollar Tree.
After I let that dry for a few minutes, I applied my first coat of Sally Hansen's Insta-Dry Fast Dry Nail Color in #31 Speedy Sunburst. It's a bright raspberry color.
I applied this with shaky, arthritic hands, which created a huge mess all around my toenails which I knew would take an army of cutips and nail polish remover to clean up.
I let that coat dry for another 5 minutes before applying my second coat.
Here's my left foot with a second coat applied and right foot with just one coat. There's really not a huge difference on camera.
Again, I let that coat dry for about 5 minutes before I moved on to my topcoat.
Although the basecoat that I had applied earlier can also be used as a topcoat, I decided to use the Sally Hansen Mega Shine Extended Wear Top Coat. My aunt gave this to me a few months ago and I really enjoy it on the rare occasions that I actually paint my nails.
Once the topcoat had dried, I was able to employ my trusty army:
I ended up not using any of the cotton balls to clean up my toes, but I did use quite a few of the cutips.
In the end, I thought my toes looked pretty good considering this had been my first time painting them myself since about middle school.
