Most of us can relate to the exasperation of spending 20 minutes painting our nails only to dent them immediately after. If we’d have known the ice nail trick, we could have lived all these years peacefully with our polish still in tact. But one TikToker, 8kateee, has taken it upon herself to educate her viewers so that we never need to wake up with fluff embedded in our mani again.
“Some of you don’t know the ice trick when doing your nails and I actually have no idea how you’re getting normal polish to look half-way decent,” she said, “but it’s my favourite girl hack of all time, so let me show you.”
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“Ok, I’m just going to paint my nails like normal,” she told the camera, “then after I’m done, I’m going to wait 30 seconds. They don’t need to be fully dry, they just can’t be dripping wet,” she adds. She chose the OPI shade Without A Pout, in case you were wondering, but the trick works with any regular polish.
She applied two coats of polish to each hand which gave the first hand time to dry enough to dip. “You just need a cup of ice water and you’re going to stick your nails in there for as long as you can,” she explained before dunking her mani. “Now we’ll do the other hand,” she continued, before repeating the step on both hands again.
“I want to test if they’re hard enough, [that’s] the whole point of this. If you’ve ever painted your nails you probably already know, if they’re not all the way dry and you go to bed or you sit down with a blanket or something, you’re gonna get little divots in the polish and it drives me up the wall,” she explains. To test, Kate dinked her thumb “because I care the least [about that nail],” she reasoned. “Just give it a little poke and [if] it’s not leaving any indent, it’s hard enough.”
Ice bath complete she concluded, “that’s it. Now my nails are locked in for perfection for at least a week.” We’re just mad we didn’t know this ice nail trick sooner.
For more from GLAMOUR’s Senior Beauty Editor, Elle Turner, follow her on Instagram @elleturneruk
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