And one guess who taught Amanda to polish nails when she was about 20 years old and still wet behind the ears?

As for the NailFresh trick? The best polish detailer in the world. Never would be without a bottle by my side.

Simply have an old used up brush and a bottle of NailFresh and if you have made any mistakes you can erase them with the tip of the brush dipped in Nail fresh which does the job 1000 times better than Scrub Fresh. Try it ... you'll see. It will also correct a wonky smile line when doing a French to a killer perfect smile line.

Using the darkest pigmentged colours? Forget worrying. all mistakes can be erradicated in a heartbeat with the NailFresh trick.

I might have guessed you were behind it, Geeg!
You know, Amanda gave me so much confidence in my manis and pedis - I have clients who come from Paris, Guernsey, Coventry for them, I have much to thank her (and therefore, you!) for. Muchas Gracias!

Well, I like to think that I do a great polish! Thankfully my clients think so too, lol! I still do lots of manicures with a lovely colour to finish, probably at least 2 a day. Im hoping that when I am the Brisa expert that im going to be , then I will still be doing lots of polishing, I love it.
Saying that, I am amazed at the amount of salons in my area that will not paint a french polish! Surely this should be part of all salons offerings!

Oh and when I was at college we had to do out final assesment for manicure with a french polish on one hand, and blood red on the other! Is this still how its assessed?

I have enjoyed and taken much pride in seeing our golden Girl Amanda evolve and her career go to the top of the tree with CND. She is a lovely person and one of the many jewels in the CND crown. LIKE ALL OF US SHE has got to the top with her own talents and the help of many mentors I'm sure ... I'm just very proud to be one of them.

Can I ask a question please Gigi? In your expert opinion, how long do you think a good polish job should take? The reason I ask is this. Having recently been there myself, colleges are teaching students to file, tend to cuticles, massage and polish (4 coats, base x2 colour & top coat) and finish with treatment oil in 30 minutes. This is also what salons expect their staff to do.

It is called a standard manicure (not even an express manicure) and I personally don't agree with it. I refuse to offer it to my clients, but if this is what the colleges are pushing, then it is not suprising some newbies to the industry are not competent at doing a lasting job.

Iv not done the colour gels yet so ,yes i love doing polish, iv alway got a french polish on my nails or a diffrent design when i get board of french lol. I had my friend round on wed and she had very dark red polish on all ten nails ,then silver glitter on the tips ,a very thin line. It looked great. My tutor said when i was at college that i was good at polish application , hope she wasnt just saying that lol ,she got me to help the other girls.I hope i stay good lol.xxxx

As a newbie to nails I am surprisingly finding do a good polish job really quite difficult. It is surprising how difficult I find to do others nail polish when I feel doing my own fairly easy. If there was a nail polish course I would definatly be on it!!!! x

Well speaking for myself, I would say a salon polish of one solid colour at the end of the enhancement service would take me 10 minutes for 4 coats.

For a perfect French it would tkae me 15 ... and I mean perfect.

To include a standard manicure I would say 45 for me or even 50 to do the job that I would consider a good standard. Express would be a tidy and polish and take 25-30 minutes for me. No soak and no massage.

I will fully hold my hands up and say I am not very good at polishing nails,
I would LOVE to be, when I see some of the beautifully polished nails in magazines etc...I'd love to do that.
I love looking through the CND look book at all the nails in there...
Maybe some good courses would be a good idea, I have never been 'trained' to polish nails as such, just did it on my college course.
It is possibly lack of practice with me,
I haven't polished many nails since I qualified, and often when I do my own I end up removing it after a few minutes as it look pants!

If it could produce designs for clients that are more affordable for them and easier to remove for them I think a course to brush up skills on polishing would be a great investment to make,
Lots of people can't afford nail enhancements or just can't wear them due to work commitments or they like 'fancy' designs done using l+p, but dont want to be stuck with something for a number of weeks, etc....
So yeah I would love to be better at polishing xxx

Thank you for a post like this...there is such an art form to painting,and some people do not realise this......there is nothing better than a professional paint than a "DIY" and this is why clients return again and again...

I,adore painting...i had a grandmother who always had painted nails,and she always encouraged this on me at such a young age...to my father's horror....her saying was "a woman feels like a woman with painted nails and stiletto heels!"

I have come across women and girls for trade tests who have stumbled on a paint...i think it is due to various factors,and you just have to keep practising for some...others caqn just do it naturally....whatever the outcome eventually you CAN become a cultivated painter when you let the frustrations subside....i always tell my husband i may not know how to boil an egg but i give a wicked manicure and polish...

Last month my rep was telling me about some new coloured gels they were promoting, and was I interested. No, I said, why would I want coloured gels when my polish lasts at least 2-3 weeks anyway, and longer on a natural overlay?!

I love polishing, and the darker the better because you then get the real 'wow' reaction from the client because they couldn't in a million years get such a good finish. Pedicure colours have to be removed or grown out because they won't budge, even a French. But then I've been perfecting my technique since I was about 10.

I've never been taught polishing on any of the courses I've been on Must see how I can remedy this.

Anyway, I've got a lovely pillar box red colour on my nails which i did a couple of weeks ago on top of a clear gel nno. As I find it really difficult to polish my own nails (you should see my right hand when I've done it!) I decided to use the Nailfresh trick, which I'd read about on one of Geeg's previous posts.

I dug out a brush with a lovely sloped flat edge out of my new set of art brushes. I started with my left hand to see how it went, and as I did the first nail I thought "This is fantastic". I could cut in so well and it left a wonderful line and removed the splodges. I did the second, which worked well, the third was a bit harder and by the fourth I wasn't really having much success. I couldn't work out why it had worked so well at the start and now I couldn't manage it at all, until I looked at the brush and realised the hairs had melted! Oops, guess it doesn't work well with the synthetic hairs on that bush! LOL

I was thinking this week about how I could increase my manicure client base as I don't have many manicure/polished nail clients.

In the competitions I have entered, my scores were poor for polishing.

I have never really been taught on any of the courses I have been on, how to polish nails, so am self taught, or from what I have read on tuts here really.

I do enjoy giving a good manicure but I have found that clients think they can wander off straight away without leaving adequate drying time. I always get them to pay before polishing and offer a cuppa after, but not all take up on that. I allow 1 hour for a full manicure with polish.

This is the service that i do the most...and i love it...

Not to brag, but i loooove polishing. I love doing french with polish, i love polishing with red and i love when my clients come back and tell me "Everyone asked me if my nails had gel!"
I started doing gel before i started doing regular manicures, and i think that rose the bar a bit higher in my standards. At first i struggled a bit because i wanted to achive that flawless look i was already getting with gel.
To me the only downsides on manicures are the drying time, breakages, and less then perfect nails...