The Best DIY Manicure .... Sophy Robson Manicure

I do my own manicure and always looking for ways to achieve more professional results. No questions, it take some practice for the best result, but it is not only about the practice. It is important to have the knowledge of how the best professionals in the industry do it. When you know the right technique, it can save a lot of time and aggravation.

I am not talking here about prepping my nails before applying a nail polish. It is the easy part. I am talking about actual painting. This part of the manicure process can be very exciting and disappointing at the same time. Exciting, because all that expectation about a new color.  Disappointing, because it may not look as neat as I wanted it to be.

The best tips on how to do the best nail painting I got from watching Sophy Robson youtube video. Sophy Robson is the most popular London's manicurist who creates amazing manicures for prestigious fashion shows and glossy magazine's photo shoots. After I watched her video, I realized that her technique was quite different than mine, if I can call my home grown effort a technique at all. Leave alone the difference between her final result and mine. After I learned Sophy Robson's technique, I never went back to what I was doing before.

So, here is the video, and if you are observant and ready to try how she does it, you may be surprised on how helpful her tips are and how relatively easy it is to make your manicure time much more enjoyable with results you were looking for. For example, I learned to start applying my nail polish by tapping the brush a couple of times at the base of the nail, which prevents too much of nail polish into the cuticle area. Also, she explained that it is important not to apply too much pressure to the brush, which may cause some pulling of the polish.

Another tricky thing for me was to understand as to how much of the polish I needed for each nail.  I have heard before that it should not be too much of polish on the brush for each nail, but how much is too much? To my surprise, Sophy Robson was taking quite a bit of a polish each time she dipped her brush into the bottle of polish, much more than I did.  Looking at her manicure, it was easy for me to conclude that she was doing it right way, not I. Anyway, I thought this video covers a lot of basics of professional manicure, and if it helped me, it may also be helpful to those of you who want to do it better as well. Let me know what you think! 


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Manicure Tips and Tricks

Do you do your manicure yourself or you go to the salon?  I have to admit, I went to a salon maybe a couple times in my whole life.  I like doing it myself and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, I prefer other people not to touch my hands with instruments.  I think this is the hygiene and trust issue.

Second, going to the salon requires scheduling an appointment, time spent in the salon, in short - another commitment that I don't need.

Lastly, my brain tells me that this is not really cost efficient spending money on the service like manicure, that lasts for one week, if I can do it myself and spend a fraction of the cost of the salon service.  I would rather spend on on great skin care products or prestigious brand cosmetics that will last me for awhile AND will give me the benefit that I would not be able to get without it.  So, if I can do my manicure myself, I do it.

There are some simple steps that are required in order to get good looking manicure.  

• Start with cleaning an old nail polish really well.  My trick to get rid of stubborn old nail polish around my cuticles I learned from Sammy of The Nailasaurus   An old tooth brush and nail polish remover.   Genius!
• Keep good care of your nails and cuticles with  Cuticle Oil from Boots No7
• Shape your nails with nail file (I prefer mine to be short) and push cuticles to make clean and neat surface for painting.
• Use base coat to protect your nails and make them stronger
• Use 3 strokes of the nail polish (start from the middle of the nail and then add other two on both sides).  I used my favorite red nail polish from Butter London in Box Pillar Red
• Finish it up with top coat to preserve your beautiful polish for as long as possible. 

Even though I was doing my manicure long enough, recently I learned a couple of more trick that improved the final look of my manicure.  According to professionals from Chanel:

• when your nails is ready for nail polish, roll the nail polish bottle between your hands to warm the formula for a smoother application (totally make sense to me)
• to make nails appear longer, leave a 1mm (or 1/32 of an inch) boarder around the cuticle and sides of the nail

That last tip about 1mm boarder sounded good, but HOW DO YOU DO THAT? Chanel experts did not explained their technique on this one.  This is when Sammy Nail Genius came to the rescue again: "Dip a small paintbrush — the teeniest one you can find — into a bottle of acetone or nail polish remover, and run it around your cuticle to clean up the edges and leave you with a nice crisp line."  Thank you, Sammy!  Yes, this is easy WHEN you know what to do.  





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