During my recent trip to Sephora I was pretty excited to see the new kit by Ciate Flower Manicure. With spring almost here, it just the cutest thing ever. I usually stick to basic manicures, never really doing fancy nail art, but when I saw the kit I fell in love.
I chose the Bada Boom kit, which comes with a pastel blue nail polish along with red, blue and purple flowers. They also have a pastel pink kit named Strike a Posey, which comes with yellow and purple flowers.
The kit includes an easy to follow pamphlet, 2 pots of dried flowers, 1 Speed Coat pro top coat, 1 “Ferris wheel” nail polish, 1 set of tweezers & 1 nail file.
At first I thought the flowers were stickers/decals but it turns out they really are dried flowers. I feel this creates a nicer effect but may cause difficulties in the application process seeing as the flowers are delicate.
I found the best way to do this is to apply 2 coats of the pastel nail polish. (I personally found the nail polish to be the worst part of the kit because it bubbled and was rather streaky.) The second step is to apply a layer of top coat followed by the flowers prior to it all drying. Finally, once the flowers are applied you seal everything with an additional layer of the top coat.
I found that if you dip the flowers in water for about 3 seconds before applying you are able to avoid them from breaking like others have mentioned on the Sephora site.
Overall, I found this to be a really cute idea for spring and I loved the texture the real flowers create without looking over the top. The kit itself runs for $25 but is worth it seeing as you could get about 4 manicures. You really do get your money’s worth considering you are get a really nice pair of tweezer and an awesome top coat.
Considering this needed a kazillion layers, it dried rather quickly and lasted for about a week before it started to chip.
Personally I like a simpler manicure for my hands but am in love with this kit for spring pedicures or creating accent nails.
