Welcome back to another blog, with me Fee Wallace. As a Nail Professional, I endeavour to offer my clients a full service with everything they need to achieve the most joy, pleasure and contentment from their experience. If every single one of your clients believes that they are your ‘favourite client’, that’s the sign of a really good Nail Pro.

Brides and the whole wedding party crew expect special attention. And well they should. Preparing a Bride for the most important manicure of their life is a big responsibility for a Nail Pro, and also, a big opportunity. How we treat our Brides and the results they achieve will drive client loyalty into the future and gain you more and more business via recommendation. In preparation for the big day, Brides will choose to allocate more money to products and services, so we must make sure we have everything they need to help them achieve the special results they are looking for.

In this blog we will take a look at the products I recommend, not just for the wedding manicure its self, but what we need to prepare our Brides and Bridal party for the most important manicure of their lives.

The CND™ PLEXIGEL System provides the different service options we need for beautiful Bridal Manicures from short and natural, to lengthened and elegant, or a long sparkling statement.

CND™ PLEXIGEL Shaper is the perfect choice for a Bride who’s natural nails are doing ok, but need a bit of help. With PLEXIGEL Shaper we can easily create a beautiful clear overlay to protect that natural nail while giving it the shape and elegant structure many clients do not have naturally. PLEXIGEL Shaper applied first, before CND Shellac gel polish, will extend the wear of the Shellac service, giving 3+ weeks of wear.

CND™ PLEXIGEL Builder allows us to extend for medium to long length. The client may need additional length on one or two nails, or on all ten. PLEXIGEL Builder has got you covered.

The CND™ PLEXIGEL Color Builder range opens up possibilities to use the power of PLEXIGEL Builder to create natural looking nail enhancements in french or single colour nude / skin tone shades.

What if my Bride breaks a nail right before her big day?

With CND™ PLEXIGEL we have the solution to broken, cracked or damaged nails. Creating a little extended corner or replacing the free edge on one short nail is a piece of (wedding) cake!

In the image below, I created a set of single colour PLEXIGEL nail enhancements using PLEXIGEL Color Builder in SOFT BLUSH, finished with a warm bronze chrome glaze. This kind of look is popular with Brides and Bridesmaids. The chrome glaze is achieved easily by using CND™ NO WIPE+ Top Coat and the CND™ Over the Top Effect ‘Off the Chain’. Step by step video later in the blog.

What is the Clean Girl Aesthetic, and how do I translate that into a Manicure?

Clients who desire this look need to do their homework. A meticulous homecare routine is essential to achieve and maintain beautifully healthy-looking skin and nails. Our hands work hard, and it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to sit and do nothing all day. Our hands work, no matter who we are. If we follow the right homecare regimen, we can do all the jobs we need to with our hands, and still maintain healthy, beautiful skin and nails. Here are my personal recommendations, that all my clients enjoy the benefits of:

CND™ PRO SKINCARE Hydrating Lotion – Massage into hands and arm up to the elbow, multiple times per day for best results. This special lotion contains the powerfully moisturising ingredients you would expect, but also utilises pro and pre-biotics to maintain the skin’s natural healthy bacterial barrier. The entire CND PRO SKINCARE range FEEDS the good micro-organisms that recent cutting-edge research shows to be completely essential for healthy and beautiful skin. Old fashioned soaps and moisturisers can strip all this away, causing skin to become MORE dry and irritated. This product is a complete revelation and so much more than just ‘hand cream’.

CND™ a.h.a. Cuticle Eraser – Once or twice a day massage in a little of this rich cream micro-exfoliator. For daily home use, there is no better product out there for treating even the thickest, toughest cuticles, lateral and proximal nail folds. Some manicurists see tough skin and just cut it away, but we know that this practice makes that tough skin grow back WORSE, exacerbating the problem long term. It is a far smarter solution to treat that problem area daily with a gentle chemical exfoliator.

CND™ Solar Oil– This essential product should be used at least twice a day and is the most important of all homecare items. For clients who will be wearing a coating on their nails, such as CND PLEXIGEL, SolarOil needs to be used to keep the relationship between the product and the natural nail in great condition. Past problems that clients may have experienced with nail coatings such as lifting and peeling, can be prevented by simply following this easy home-care rule.

To meet the expectations of my Clean Girl Clients, I levelled up my procedure when performing meticulous nail and skin preparation, by treating myself to a brand new set of metal tools for manicuring, and what a difference it’s made to my service. When our tools become old and blunt we begin to apply more pressure when completing cuticle work. It happens gradually so perhaps we don’t even notice. Heavier pressure on the newest, youngest part of the nail plate, the lunula (the moon at the base of the nail), can cause unintentional lasting damage to the nail plate that will have to grow out. I recommend using sharper tools with a very light touch, rather than blunt tools that require more pressure to get the job done.

My new tools come from :YOURS, who I already trust as a brand to supply high quality metal stamping plates for nail art, as well as the legendary :YOURS Halo Stamper and other stamping and nail art paraphernalia. I’m excited to see what else will be coming from :YOURS as it looks like they are continuing to expand into other product lines to support the Nail Professional.

Get all the info on the :YOURS tools HERE 

My personal highlights from the range are the PRECISION CUTICLE NIPPERS and the CUTICLE CHISLE.

Bridal Nail Designs

Remember those French ombre / baby boomer nails from the last blog? (Step by step plus tutorial video here ) Now it’s time to decorate those beautiful, elegantly natural, PLEXIGEL nail enhancements. Most Brides opt for something chic and understated, so choosing one or two simple nail design elements will likely be plenty.

Essential Nail Art Stamping Supplies for Wedding Season:

-:YOURS Stamping Plate - Vintage Lace

-:YOURS Stamping Plate - Language of Lace

-:YOURS Stamping Plate – Off the Cuff

- Stamping Polish – White Light

- Stamping Polish – Nude Nature

- Stamping Polish – Blue Jasmin

-:YOURS Halo Stamper

Here is the process for those Chrome Glaze Nails pictured earlier in the blog:

I began by performing CND™ PREP to my client’s nails to ensure superb adhesion and durability. To extend the length of her natural nails, we chose to sculpt on forms. CND™ Future Forms give us platform on which to sculpt a beautifully structured nail enhancement. CND™ PLEXIGEL Bonder is applied in a thin layer to the natural nail, then cured in the CND™ LED Lamp using button (1), the base coat setting. CND™ PLEXIGEL Color Builder in Soft Blush was used to create the single colour nail enhancements in layers, each cured for 1 minute using button (2B), the gel setting, in the CND™ LED Lamp. Once cured, the enhancements were file finished using 180 and 240 grit files.

If you are looking for a more detailed step by step for using CND PLEXIGEL to create enhancements, check out the info in this blog https://www.sweetsquared.com/blog/intro-to-plexig...

After cleansing the file finished nails enhancements with 99% IPA, we applied CND™ SHELLAC NO WIPE+ Top Coat and cured using button (3), the Top Coat setting in the CND™ LED Lamp. This special Top Coat is unique in the range because it gives us the perfect surface to ‘chrome up’ pigments and chrome powders. For the soft bronze glaze I used CND™ Over the Top Effect ‘Off the Chain’, buffed into the cured NO WIPE+ Top Coat layer with a clean, dry sponge, then finished with CND™ Shellac Duraforce Top Coat.

I hope this blog has inspired you to get prepared for wedding season. I’d love to see you back on the blog soon, or LIVE for my regular show, TUNE IN TUESDAY. You can register as they appear here: https://www.sweetsquared.com/academy2-live/

Fee xxx

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