These stick-on false nails from Impress are a clever idea. Coming in a wide range of pre-painted colours, they're a no-fuss way of achieving a manicured look without arsing around with nail glue. Ever glue your index finger to your thumb? Yeah, me too.
The nails come very sweetly packaged in a little plastic bottle that mimics a standard bottle of nail polish. You'll get twenty-four nails in all. Why so many? Impress want to make sure that they have enough sizes to provide an appropriately sized falsie for every size and shape of nail. My primary beef with these is that they don't actually succeed in doing that. More on that later...
I should start with a few caveats. I'm lucky to be able to grow my own nails reasonably long without them breaking, so I generally avoid false ones. Also, my own nails are naturally almond shaped rather than square-edged, so I don't like the look of square edged false nails on me. I think that they work better for women whose nails are naturally shaped that way.
As you might know from my recent post on Great Lengths Hair Extensions, I'm by no means averse to a spot of fakery. I just don't like it when something looks blatantly false!
The shade I tried is Kiss and Tell, a nice shade of soft, graduated pink. These come in a medium length. I think that the original, shorter length are easier to get away with and look more natural. See them in action here.
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The nails come with adhesive pre-attached, so application is a simple matter of finding the nail with the best size match, peeling off the little plastic seal and pressing the false nail on top of your natural nail. Easy as pie!
So I had no issues applying them. The problem was that there were no accurate size matches for the nails on my middle and index fingers. I chose the closest possible match, but the fact that the sizes just aren't right makes the nails look false and awkward.
Impress say that you can cut and file the nails, so I rounded the square edges since the square talon look doesn't work for me! However, they're SO time consuming to file, and if you vertically cut the sides of a nail to try to make a better fit, you end up with a weird hard edge which, again, just looks false. They should last up to a week. Despite what Impress claim, I found them very difficult to remove, even with the help of nail polish remover!
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You can judge for yourself by the photos. All in all, these nails are a great idea and will look good on nails that they happen to fit. At €8.50 for the block colour version and €10.50 for those sporting nail art, whether or not you want to take the fitting risk is up to you….
Have you tried Impress nails, and have they worked for you? Do I just have weird mutant nails? To the comments!
