Birds of a Feather (Water Decal Review)

Hey guys! Sorry for not posting in a while, but it's exam month (boo), which means I have significantly less time to paint my nails. As a bit of a compromise with myself (because I can't stand plain nails even when I'm studying), I decided it would be the perfect time to try out these full-nail water decals from Born Pretty!

These decals come in a 1 sheet package and are also available in 8 other designs, (the one I'm using is Pattern BLE2113).

Gasp! It's my naked nails! (I know they're really yellow, it's just from the constant painting; I'm sure most of you can relate lol).

To be honest, even though the product description says that it’s one sheet, I had been expecting multiple smaller decals that would all have the entire pattern on them, (that’s my fault for not paying enough attention to the description though). 


On the same subject, you can see the size of the whole decal compared to my nail in the third picture, and it’s not all that large. If (like me) you want to have specific parts of the image on your nail this decal will not be large enough to cover ten nails. By using specific sections of the decal I ended up with a lot of thin strips of decal that were too small to cover a nail and thus were pretty much wasted. Unless you disregard the image and just cut the decal into 10 pieces, it will not be large enough for a complete manicure. It would be fine for doing maybe two accent nails per hand, but if a full manicure is what you’re after I would recommend picking up two sheets.
Also, the product number that you see (the BLE2113) is printed right onto the decal which makes that whole bottom corner pretty much useless.

This was my first time using full nail decals and it was a pretty interesting process. I first decided what parts of the design I wanted on each nail and cut them out:

As you can see, one of the decals that I cut out does not actually appear on any of my nails. This is because I haven’t used decals in so long that I forgot that there’s a plastic layer on them and put the decal into the water with the plastic still on it... Needless to say I couldn’t separate the decal from the plastic when I removed it from the water, so that entire section was useless. So yeah, definitely remember to remove the plastic!! 

After ruining that piece I didn’t have anything large enough to cover my thumb so I ended up making a (pretty cool looking) Franken-nail with different excess-strips:

I think that nail actually ended up being my favourite, I think the whole patchwork thing looks pretty cool!

After that little incident, everything went pretty smoothly. It wasn’t that difficult to get the decals to lie flat on the nail which was nice; I think the hardest part was probably the cleanup, as in removing the excess decal. I used a paintbrush dipped in acetone to remove it and while the acetone did dissolve the decal quickly and easily, it also pulled at the decal on the nail a bit. It’s not too much of a problem, and if you work slowly and gently it shouldn’t pull the design.
Also, you should probably be careful when applying your top coat, I found that it pulled at the decal at the tips of my nails (you can see how the decal is kind of dissolved around the tip of my pinky nail; that's from the topcoat).

These decals are completely opaque so you won’t need to use a base polish underneath them (though I did use a base coat, which I would recommend you do as well). I tried having a sheer white polish as a base on my thumb and I don’t think it made any difference in the appearance of the decal (as opposed to not having a base colour on my other nails).

Also just a quick comment on the design of the decal; I think it’s really pretty as a whole, but I’m a little less impressed with it once it’s in pieces. You loose a lot of the aesthetic of the decal because of the limited surface area of your nails which kind of sucks. The pieces that I used with the peacocks’ heads look pretty good but I find the pieces with their feathers are just kind of ‘meh’ (it’s all personal opinion though!).

These decals are quite pretty though and I’m happy with how easy they were to apply and how opaque they were. If you want to try them out for yourself they sell for C$2.60 (US$2.12) and come in 8 other designs as well, (the product code is ID: 17366 and I used Pattern BLE2113).

Don’t forget that you can use the code FHX31 for 10% off your order (on top of BPS’s free worldwide shipping)!

Thanks for reading!

xo,

Becca.

** These products were provided for review. All opinions are my own and have not been influenced by anyone. **