Elegant Touch Express Press-On Instant Manicure review

As a massive fan of gel nails, particularly Calgel, my nails hadn’t been without a coat of gel for absolute years. I wore it all the way through college, university and some time after up until just a few months ago when I decided to give my nails a little time to just breathe.

On a recent trip to Boots to pick up some essential beauty supplies, I came across the Elegant Touch Express Press-On Instant Manicure sets. I used to wear press on nails absolute years ago when the nails were horribly thick and looked extremely tacky – I’m talking fluorescent yellow nails with huge sky blue and crimson red flowers dotted all over them, not an understated look to say the least but could have been quite striking had it not been for the digger-sized tips. Anyway, the Elegant Touch offerings looked quite different and came in a really good variety of styles and colours. At £7.99 for a 24 nail pack, I thought I might as well give them a go.

The colour I chose was a gorgeous deep burgundy named Polished Garnet. The next evening, I decided to give my nails a pre-manicure and pop the nails on.

The pack comes with a short set of instructions which advises you to thoroughly clean and dry your nails before using the nail wipe which comes with the pack. I assume that this dehydrates the nail plate before application so that the natural oils that sit on the nail are stripped away leaving a smooth, dry surface for the glue tabs to adhere to. Each nail comes with a glue tab already fixed so the only thing you need to do is size up the nails to your own, peel away the sticky tab and press on in the centre and the sides. Having quite small nails in width, I found it quite difficult to find nails to match my own and only four out of the whole pack were small enough to fit naturally. Nevertheless, I picked the closest and pressed them on. The whole process literally took around five minutes – they really are express!

As you can see from the picture below, the nails do look quite lovely and natural once first applied, but because some of them were too large and a little too wide to look completely natural, I clipped and filed a little away.

 

I applied the nails on Sunday evening and they felt extremely sturdy and didn’t leave me in fear that they’d end up pinging off at the most inappropriate moments like the old offerings of press on nails so often did. I woke up this morning (Monday – this post will be going live on Tuesday morning!) with each nail still intact and each nail feeling just as strong as the night before. I wore the nails throughout the day for a dinner and cinema date with hardly any issues except one which is kind of a biggie…

As you’ll see from the image below, the natural arch of the false nail doesn’t quite match the natural arch of my own nail so there’s quite a significant gap between the false nail and my own – a great place for dirt and nasty bacteria to set up home, so sadly, the nails had to go after one day instead of the full seven. Had it not been for the gap, I’m pretty sure the nails would have lasted the full seven days providing I’d been careful when taking a bath or styling my hair (I found that my hair got stuck underneath the nails quite often).

The nails took me all of a few minutes to remove by gently peeling them away from the cuticle upwards, and my nails were left clean of any glue residue with absolutely no damage. I’d really recommend these nails for a quick fix for a night out or special occasion, they’re fab for a really fast manicure with zero fuss and zero drying time. Had they fit my natural nail arch a little better, I’d definitely repurchase them them in the future. A really lovely product that has been made with the consumer in mind and offers a really great variety of colours and styles. Have you tried the Elegant Touch Press-On nails before? What did you think?

© This post is copyright of Rachael Divers 2014.