My Manicure Routine

Hello beauty world :)
How have you been?!
Well I've been great, kind off busy but tonight I have completely devoted my time to writing a new blog post.
I think this one is particularly fun, because it's about manicures. And who doesn't love manicures, especially if you can do them at home.

Let's start with the few things you will need for this part of a pamper day or night:

1. A towel
2. A bowl that is big enough
3. Water
4. A lemon
5. Cotton pads or cotton balls

6. Nail polish remover of your choice
7. A bath cream or oil that foams up
8. A Nail File

9. Cuticle peeling and cuticle balm
10. A base coat (in my case two- one for strenght and the other for a whitening effect)
11. Dry drops
12. A nail polish of your choice

I know I listed a lot of things, but this is just the way I like to do it and it works for me personally. You can skip a few products if you like, that is all up to you.

After getting together all of this things that I listed I follow these steps:

Step 1:
I take my cotton pad, I moist it with nail polish remover and I remove my previous nail color.I think this is the easiest one and also an obvious step.

Step 2:
Fill up your bowl with warm water and pour a little of your bath oil or cream. After it foams up you are ready to soak your hands in it.

This step is going to clean, relax, hydrate and soften your nails. That way they will be perfectly prepared for the upcoming steps.
I soak my fingers for about 10 minutes maximum, also I like the water to be a little warmer because within the 10 minutes it tends to cool off.

Step 3: 
After you have wiped your hands throw away the cooled off water and clean the bowl.
Once you have done that go ahead and put some warm water again in the bowl and this time we are adding squized lemon juice. You can add as much as you want to. Soak your hands for about 5 minutes.

This step will work on the strength of you nails. Nail treatments with lemon have actually resulted in strengthening chipping nails after a while. This has worked for me so far. Although I do have pretty brittle nails. And because of that I is really hard to grow them out without breaking.

Step 4:
Here are my nails after the whole soaking process. And now that we have completed those steps it is time to dry them well and file the nails in the wanted shape. 

The nails have softened a little because of the soaking which will make the filing very easy and quick.
And after a little bit of effort you will achieve nicely filed nails.

Step 5:
Now it's time to take care of the cuticles. I use this Essence peeling and a cluticle balm. You can use which ever products you have at home for this. A thick moisturizing hand cream does the job too.

Step 6:
This is the final step. After applying your cuticle cream you can go ahead and apply your base coat. What I do (and this makes perfect sense in my head) is I first apply a strengthening base coat and after that dries I apply my pro-white base coat. And at last apply a nail polish color of your choice. Here I used a very soft pink manicure nail polish and I put some dry drops over it so it dries faster.

This is how my nails looked before and after I went through all the steps. They are not perfect but at least with time and a proper treatment they will recover. 

How do you do your manicure? Do you go to the nail salon or do you do it yourself?
If you have any additional tips or tricks please tell me by commenting :)
I hope you liked reading my post.
Have a nice day, 
Dee.