April Gets Gel Polish and I Get Re-Browed!

Monday my friend April came in and I was going to get a fill on her acrylic nails... except that I didn't do a very good job <ooops!> when I applied them so we wound up taking them off completely.  :(  But that's OK because I also need practice removing "nail enhancements", as the book calls them.

We started by soaking off the acrylic nails in acetone but then my teacher, Ana, showed me a quicker way which I will describe once I've done it a few more times and know more what I'm talking about, lol!  It worked pretty good though and April said it wasn't pleasant but it wasn't really painful either so yay, right?!

To give you a little bit of background I should say that April has never in her life had any sort of artificial nails (and doesn't need them, honestly,) yet she has wholeheartedly thrown herself into supporting my schooling by being my guinea pig whenever I need one - God bless her!  It's been mostly fun and games for April, free mani-pedis every week for six weeks or so but it was time to pay her dues, so to speak, when the acrylic nails came out...  On Halloween for 3 1/2 very long hours <I was so embarrassed it took that long...> she endured having the superglue I used to apply the tips sticking the entire end of her finger to the plastic tips for days until the glue wore off, the seemingly endless filing by hand that was uncomfortable and harsh on her cuticles and I even drew blood twice (yes, it was on accident!) at different points in the whole process.  Everybody give April a hand!  <loud, thunderous applause - can you hear it April?> 

And back to the present... April came in Monday and we wound up taking off the acrylics and applying just gel polish to her fingers and toes, which will help strengthen them from the (minor) damage caused by removing the acrylics and I think she will like a lot better :P  We used a different brand of gel polish than the Gelish I had bought previously, it belongs to the school and the brand name is Cuccio - I have no idea how to pronounce it...  Coo-chee-oh?  All the colors the school has seem to be very sheer so it takes a minimum of two coats and I've done up to four coats to get the color right but other than that the Cuccio seems to be a pretty decent product.  Once I've used them both a little more I'll do a post about Gelish versus Cuccio and decide which one I like best.  At any rate, I did a translucent, pearly polish on the entire nail and then what was supposed to be a vibrant medium-deep purple line on the tips.  On the toes we tried some nail art with the Cuccio polish and it was OK to work with but again, the colors were very sheer so I didn't feel like the nail art was as vibrant as it should have/could have been but check it out!

Tuesday/yesterday the esthetics students shaped my brows by giving them an arch.  I feel like I look more interesting now... or maybe it's that I look more interested in what I'm looking at now... and today they tinted (dyed) them again!  I love my "new look" and am sooooo excited!  Here's photos of the journey my eyebrows took:

The eyebrows I was born with...

Shaped Eyebrows

Shaped and Tinted Eyebrows.

It's kind of hard to tell the differences between the tinted eyebrows and the un-tinted ones but when I look in the mirror I can see they're darker now :)   Fun, fun, fun!