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Today I have my first product review from the second batch of goodies Maggie from Beauty BigBang sent me. This was my first time using real flowers on my nails, but I have used pheasant feathers on my nails before. I’ve found the hardest part about it to be getting the item in question to follow the curve of my nail. This also turned out to be true when it came to dried plants with the added worry of causing them to break apart.
Their site lists this item as “3D Clover Colorful Real Dried Flower Leaf Nail Decoration For Manicure” with SKU: J6300-6C. There are five other options, but I picked the one with clover and bright red flowers because I loved the color combination and calculated that it would arrive before Saint Patrick’s Day. This option comes with three flowers and one four-leaf clover packaged in a tiny screw-top jar. If you are trying to use the flowers as whole pieces instead of cutting them up to use the separate petals and leaves, you will probably want to order more than one jar for a full manicure.
Application
I used regular clear polish to adhere everything to my nails and that worked fairly well. I was careless enough to pull off a petal, but I was able to pry it off the offending finger and stick it back on so you couldn’t even tell I’d done it. Size-wise, my fingernails are 2cm long and the clover was still bigger than them. I think if you’re not trying to do an obviously clover-based mani and are just using it for the green, the clover can easily be broken up to cover more nails. It also might be a better idea to do that because I did experience some breakage on the edges as I tried to get it to curve all the way around my nails and while trimming the excess off with my cuticle scissors. It did end up curling up a bit at the ends too. All of the pieces still had a surprising amount of flexibility though. My ring finger has a high c-curve and the flower follows it.
I love how the flowers looked without top coat, but there’s no way they’d survive even a few hours on my nails without some protection so I used a glossy top coat. I would definitely have needed to put more than one layer of it to smooth things out, but I wasn’t sure glossy was the look I wanted with dried flowers anyway.
I wanted something softer, so a I used a matte top coat…
Dried Clover/Flowers – matte
…and I’m pretty sure that’s my favorite look.
Final Thoughts
I noticed some color bleed from the flowers, which I probably wouldn’t have gotten if I’d used gel polish. I suspect they’ve been dyed. (Note how the flower centers are also red.) I actually think that’s a plus. It means you’re more likely to get a consistent color and the artificially bright color will also match better with the artificial colors in nail polish. I’ve seen a few videos of people who have dried flowers to put on their nails and the colors do tend to be a bit duller which means you have to be more careful what polishes you pair it with.
Also, I’ve dried clover before and my results were much darker. I wonder if they are using some sort of freeze dry method which would explain the texture of the leaf as well…
Another thing you have to make peace with is that your results will be a bit lumpy. The petals are thin, but the center of the flower is not. A way to escape this is to encapsulate it in an artificial nail. I’ve seen some absolutely gorgeous designs that encapsulate flowers in a clear nail (again, a reason why the dyed flowers are awesome because the colors really pop as the light shines through them). Here is one fantastic example from LongHairPrettyNails.
Finally, I recommend only buying these when you plan to use them. The longer you wait, the more dry and brittle they will get (especially the leaves) and that means you will struggle more to get good results. Plus, why wouldn’t you want to use these right away?
There are lots of options for dried flowers out there on the web. Personally, I would avoid any packaged in a wheel since the very design of the package will damage the items over time. If you order this set from Beauty BigBang, feel free to use my discount code (hermi) for 10% off your order.
Thanks again for sending me this lovely set, Maggie!
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