college girl style trends

My college student daughter and I are always trying to recreate the latest fad.  We love working together to find an easy and inexpensive way to figure out the latest trends.  We figured out how to find the materials to attach feathers to the hair without the assistance of a salon…and, yes, we tried out hair chalking…our most recent project was caviar nails.

While shopping at Sephora together, we saw a caviar nail kit that was selling for $25. It provided all the materials necessary to create one of these caviar manicures.  It is a 3-D effect where caviar-like beads sit on the nails.  The nail sample next to the product was really neat looking.  We loved the white one.  I thought it would be a great manicure for a wedding.  But, $25!  It didn’t look like something that could be that hard to recreate…we were on a mission!

We scanned the craft stores to find some type of small bead to use as the ‘caviar.’  At the third craft store we visited, we found something called microbeads.  They sell for $2 or $3 a bottle.  Wow!  They looked just like the ones on display at Sephora!   The beads were located in the scrapbooking section, so apparently they are used in scrapbooking.  They come in a huge assortment of colors.  Even though we really liked the white, we decided to buy a set so we could experiment with different colors.  The box of 6 bottles had an assortment of six colors and cost under $10.

A photo of microbeads used in creating a caviar manicure.

Well, our first attempt created the white manicure with very little effort.  It only required some nail polish and the microbeads!  Easy.  Since we already had the polish and used a very small amount from one bottle of microbeads, it probably only cost pennies to create the caviar manicure.

This is how we did it:         

FIRST applied white polish to nails.

THEN poured clear microbeads onto wet polish (putting a little bowl underneath to catch the extras – we just put these right back into the bottle) 

That’s pretty much it.  We put clear polish on top to protect the beads ( that changes the color a little bit).

We decided the caviar manicure was cool but should either be used for a special occasion, or just for one accent nail, since it doesn’t last more than a couple days before the beads start coming off.  For best results, use a color polish that matches the bead color you decide to use…then any gaps between the beads aren’t noticeable.  We tried black right away because we had some black polish on hand.

Caviar nails….conquered!  Our next project:  ombre hair!

Glad these trends are experimented on my daughter and not me ;)

Have you tried any trends with your daughter?   Would love to hear about it!  Thanks for visiting, Jackie