Emma Clark's Senior Project: Nailed It!

Throughout these past few weeks, I have completed all of the goals I set for myself. I interview a local nail salon and talked with the nail technicians about their work. I learned different nail application types like acrylics, poly gel, and regular gel and I also created a few intricate nail designs on myself and my friends. My goals never necessarily changed, but after experimenting with each of the different application types, I've come to the conclusion that working with acrylic nails and regular gel polish worked the best and resulted in the best final look. Therefore, I created more acrylic nail looks than anything else. I really enjoyed spending these last few weeks exploring the world of nails and nail art and I plan to continue honing my skills (and maybe even purchasing some professional-grade materials). I would definitely recommend this senior project to another student and would also recommend that the school incorporate the wider "passion project" proposals...

This week I continued working on different nail designs and experimenting with more intricate nail art. As seen in the picture below, I worked on three different nail looks. On the first nail, I used only regular polish and found that the black nail polish I used must've been too old because it would clump together and form sticky, uneven lines. On the second nail, I used a combination of regular and gel polish. Again, I found that when using regular nail polish to create the actual nail art (in this case, the light blue french tip), the polish would dry too quickly and the final result would look lumpy. On the third nail, I use only gel polish. I found this to be the best out of all three attempts. The final result looks professional and smooth. I learned that when doing difficult and tiny nail art that requires a lot of time, it's a good idea to use gel polish instead of regular polish. This week I also painted a friend's nails using a mixture of white and blue gel polish...