A Fistful of Fingernails: Nail Art & Cosmetic Goodness: KKCenterHK's N.NAIL Grassland Leopard Water Decals

I was SO excited to try these N.NAIL Grassland Leopard Water Decals from KKCenterHK. What's really special about these is that they're essentially photographs. No weird cartoons--these are straight-up National Geographic quality. They come in large rectangles so you can cut them according to how you're going to use them.

Round 1:
I chose only to do a full accent nail (more would just be a bit outrageous wouldn't it?), so I picked one of the leopards and trimmed it to roughly fit my nail. I applied a base coat and two coats of a sheer nude, and while the nude polish was still tacky I applied the water decal. I let it sit and dry for a while, filed off the excess decal, and then applied a top coat (China Glaze)... now, my choice of top coat was a mistake because it was a fast-drying TC and it created small tears in the image. Luckily you can only see these up close. Other than that small user-issue, it looks so cool! I loved it so much that I left this decal on my nail for about 3 weeks (I changed the polish on my other nails). It lasted that long, too--I only had to take it off because the amount of new growth on my nail looked ridiculous.

Round 2:

I wanted to try these again to see if I could achieve better results with a different top coat (Revlon--dries slower than China Glaze). I cut the decal on my index finger while it was dry and on the backer paper, hence the (mostly) smooth cuticle edge. I did the same with the middle finger, but after some fumbling I completely lost the original cuticle edge and had to improvise (and therefore lost the head of a leopard). The good news is that a slower-drying TC resulted in less crackling of the image. Hooray!