Some people are fine with walking around with chipped nail polish. I am not one of those people. Some people have nails that stay perfect for a whole week without chipping. I am not of of those people either. As some of you may recall I wrote a post a while back about how I do an at home manicure that lasts, and I usually get a good few extra days out of my manicure by doing all those steps. But there are days and weeks when your nail polish is just no match for the tasks at hand.

Usually my week consists of mostly simple tasks like sitting behind my computer and writing blog posts. There are other weeks however, which consist of other things like packing to move and 10 hour outdoor photo shoots. Those are the weeks when I just can’t keep my nails in order.

Of course those are also the weeks when I don’t have the time or energy left to sit down and completely re-paint my nails. This week was one of those weeks, for sure. But I have gotten really good at patching up the chips and making it look nice and fresh for a few more days and I had a freshly banged up manicure to demonstrate with so I figured I would pass along the knowledge. Sharing is caring.

For the demonstration I am going to concentrate on this one large chip, but the same idea can be applied to all the small chips and “tip wear” on the other nails as well.

To begin with you will need the nail polish that you are already wearing (duh) and a small brush. I am using a nail art brush with short bristles, but an old eyeliner brush or an art brush will do just fine.

For years when I was trying to patch up a manicure I would go at it with the brush that comes in the bottle of polish but I was never happy with how it looked. You could always see that gross lumpy line where the layers are uneven, and maybe I’m just really picky but I think thats just as ugly as having chipped nails, and therefore it is pointless.

Eventually a lightbulb went off and I learned to avoid that problem by using a small brush to paint in ONLY the area where the polish has chipped off. That way I wasn’t building on top of the original layers and adding to the difference in thickness. So simple (yet it still took me years to think of it).

Another key here is not to just blob on a lot of polish in the chipped area and hope that it looks opaque and matches the rest of the nail. If you do that it will pool around the chipped edge and still look uneven, not to mention that you are SO going to smudge it. Blobs take forever to dry.

So have a little patience and dab on one quick coat, let it dry for about a minute and then go for a second coat. See how even it looks after the second coat? Not too shabby. (Literally, Ha!)

Ok so now that it’s patched up really good you need to add topcoat. Normally I tell everyone that they’re nuts if they aren’t using a fast dry top coat, but in this instance you want to stay away from it. I find that when you use a fast dry formula on top of nail polish that has already dried it causes a lot of shrinking .

Now they should look a little sumpin’ like this.

Oh! and very important please note that I put the top coat on ALL of my nails, not just the ones I fixed. Nail polish gets dull after a few days so if you want the whole thing to look fresh and even you need to top them all up a bit.

Little added bonus is this will also help extend the life of the polish further, so try not to be lazy (I know it’s hard, being lazy feels so good sometimes)

And since you didn’t use a fast dry top coat, you may want to use a nail polish drying spray. It’s not really as fast as a fast drying top coat, but it is still pretty damn fast. That way you won’t walk away, open a box of crackers because you are STARVING like to death and smudge them all and curse yourself for your lack of patience. (based on a true story)

Once you hit those babies with the drying spray, you are all done and your fingers should be looking funky fresh. Or maybe just fresh, but hopefully not just funky.

Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!