In the beginning, there was…well a whole lot of nothing is pretty accurate. Despite not being super girly overall, I had been a long term nail and nail art afficianado (read: obsessed lunatic), and I had hit a dry spell. I moved to the country. I started building things. I started growing things. I was the driver and conductor on the sweat equity train. And I’m happy with what I did, but there was no way on God’s green (and often quite brown here in summer as it turned out) earth, I could keep nails, much less a manicure. And then one day, I was watching YouTube videos of nail art creators and being utterly jealous of their lives (but in no way willing to give up my slice of parahell (yes, parahell – welcome to homeownership)), and I noticed something in a sidebar/recommended video called dip powder.

31 Piece Dip Nails Powder Starter Kit, AZUREBEAUTY

I watched the video. And I thought, this may actually work! Now I need to sell $30 worth of eggs to find out. I failed to sell the eggs. But I bought the dip starter kit anyway. Because I was compelled to. No really, compelled. I had absolutely no free will here at all.

Oh, that kit – it was great! But I, I was awful. My first mani chipped, peeled, destroyed my nails. All because I had absolutely NO idea what I was doing. Once I corrected my complete incompetence (Tips for being smarter than me, I will share in a blog to come), this cheap entry level kit became a really wonderful gateway drug. I regularly take manis off because I’m bored with them now vs. any damage. Weeks of wear is normal! Oh and the two polishes that show a gradient color in the pic above are mood nail polish. They change color based on heat! (It took 2 full days of confusion to figure out if my blue nail polish was somehow gaslighting me into thinking it was originally purple… The green has a similar trick up it’s sleeve…)

And even though I’ve experimented with many different dip liquids at this point, I find the included AzureBeauty dip liquid to be pretty decent all things considered. I’ll link just the liquid in the shop in the future for you. And now, not only do I have a gateway drug, I’m a dealer! Welcome to paradise! Muahahhahaha.