Getting the Most from a Manicure

1. Never push back dry cuticles. Pushing back dry cuticles can crack polish at the base, which leads to chipping your polish.  You don’t want any cuticle skin on the nail’s surface (it can interfere with your base coat) — so loosen ragged edges by rubbing in a softening cream. Then gently cuticles back with an orangewood stick.

2. Don’t soak your fingertips. When you soak your nails, they absorb water, which temporarily puffs them up — but they go back to their normal shape when the water evaporates. This expansion and contraction causes chipping, peeling, and cracking of polish.

3. Get the surface clean, clean, clean. Any traces of moisture, dust, or leftover enamel will get in the way of new-polish adhesion.  Use a nail brush or an old toothbrush to clean hard to reach areas of the nail.  Then wipe your nails with an acetone polish remover to temporarily dehydrate your nail.

4. Shape up. To maximize nail strength, tips should be rounded and corners left somewhat square. Filing is healthier than clipping, because clippling can crack the nail. Use a fine-grit nail file and file in one direction.

5. Apply a base coat. A base coat sticks to nails better than polish does.Try Avon’s Smooth Beginnings Base Coat.  It instantly smoothes and evens out ridges.

6. Once polish is on, seal it with a slow-setting topcoat. Quick-dry polish evaporates too fast and leaves polish soft and prone to denting. Avon’s UV Gloss Guard Top Coat prevents nail enamel from yellowing and fading.

7. Polish should be applied in three narrow, even strokes — one down the center and one down each side — and then be allowed to dry for two minutes before a second coat is applied. The thicker the layer is, the more difficult it is for the solvent — the liquid agent in enamel — to evaporate, boosting the chances that polish will peel.

8. Practice good maintenance.  Every other day, apply a layer of quick-dry topcoat  to form a protective shield and increase shine.

9. Moisturize your polish. The more your enamel dries out, the greater the likelihood that it will separate from your nail. Since topcoats don’t seal in hydration, apply oil to nails and cuticles before bedtime, and slather on a thick hand cream twice a day.

Questions or comments? Join our discussion on our message board.

Get Out There And Vote

This isn’t about who you vote for it’s about a woman’s right to vote. Did you know that women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920? The movement started in 1848. “The women’s suffrage movement”
Do you know how much women really suffered because of picketing the White House for the right to vote? I didn’t either until I read this:
Women picketing for the right to vote were arrested and by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating,choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

Why is it that you won’t make it to the polls this year?
We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?

Last February HBO released the movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’
It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that you and I could pull the curtain at the polling booth. Here’s a clip, I have to warn you it is disturbing.YouTube – Iron Jawed Angels- Psych Ward/Force Feeding

Join our discussion on our message board

Super glue and baking soda

A couple years ago my husband taught me a little trick with super glue and baking soda.  He said if you need something to really hold and super glue isn’t working try this.  I had a wood baby gate that was broken.  He got some super glue and put a big glop around the area that was broken, the sprinkled it with baking soda all around till it set.  It stuck and held it back together again.  It lasted a good couple of years till we were done but it held up rather well.

I would recommend the super glue in a tube that you have to squeeze out not the one that has that little point that you need to press to make it come out.  You’ll be there all day with that one.

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