I've always looked the look of beautiful, colorful long nails. A couple of times in my life, I went to get my nails done with acrylics and nail tips. They always turned out great, but they were too expensive to maintain. And although, I loved going to the nail shop, it became more and more difficult to find the time to drive out there to either get my nails refilled (when they grow out, you have to add more acrylics to fill in the gaps) or to get them repaired when I broke them.
Eventually, I let the whole thing go. Last year, I was into using gel nail polish. I blame that interest on the banker at my local bank. That lady always has the cutest designs and colors on her nails. She told me that she had gel on them, and since I'd seen gel polish at a store, I decided to buy some "no light" polish and see if the color would last for a couple of weeks and if it would strengthen my paper-thin nails. That didn't work, because the "no light" gel nails seemed just light regular nail polish. It would crack and peel off of my nails on a couple of days. So, then I decided to go the "UV light" route. I bought a UV light, a consumer version of the professional ones that they use in the nail shops to sort of bake on (not really) the UV gel nail polish. I've had my nails done in a shop before with UV gel before, and it worked great. I always thought that UV lights were super-expensive, but they're not. You can find UV/LED lights for around $20, and there are some gel nail kits that even come with a tiny UV light.
Anyway, I found some cool pictures online with gel nails, and I before I knew it, I was buying nail tips, real UV gel (not the polish) and nail glue and stuff. So, I watched some how-to videos to assure myself that it really is easy to finally have nails, and I sat up until 1 a.m. going through the steps. After a scare from gluing my fingers together (for real) I'm here to say, that if I can do this, you can, too. It's not so easy to type with super-long nails, but I'm figuring it out. I'm also planning my design for my second set.
