Welcome to Canvas Nails 1,0,1, where I tell you all the things I hated about every other nail solution on the market, which inspired me to create the first ever custom fit gel extension system that allows you to get a salon quality manicure for less than $9 and about 30 minutes at home.
Just be honest, even whenever you have a truly innovative product like ours that has never been done for, it is difficult to differentiate yourself in the nail market because there are just so many solutions. And honestly, unless you’re deep in the DIY nail world, most people don’t know the pros and cons of all those different solutions. Heck, most people don’t even know what those solutions are. So that’s where I come in.
Let’s talk about the solutions that existed on the market before canvas and what I hated about them. First, while I do my nails with canvas nail stuff. First we gotta talk about the solutions that are for basically either the lucky or very disciplined girls who just are happy with the length and strength of their own nails. People have nice, strong, long, natural nails that they can just paint that don’t even need any kind of extension. Couldn’t be me.
First, we have this regular nail polish. Cons to regular nail polish is that obviously takes a long time to dry. It doesn’t have great wear time and it can also chip really easily. Honestly, let’s just be honest, painting your nails can be really messy, especially on your non dominant hand and it’s not for everybody. Gel nail polish helps a lot with the dry time. Cure it under light and it hardens right away. Actually, it’s like prep work and then a base coat and then two to three layers of nail polish and your top coat. So a lot of gel product going on your nails. We gotta paint your nails. A couple of solutions that are good for people that have good length on their nails, but they need some extra strength to make their mannies hold up. The most popular solution for that is typically dip powder. So if you’re happy with the length of your nails, you can just use dip powder by basically painting on the dip powder glue and then dipping it into powder. You repeat that process until it builds up the strength of your nail. I’ve done dip powder before, and I will say it was extremely difficult for me. I experienced with dip powder, it is difficult to make your nails look nice and clean, feel like the dip powder is just really hard to get it to look smooth. It can often look chunky and make your nails look really thick. And it’s just not a look that I really like. And while dip powder is extremely durable, which is great, it’s also extremely hard to remove the density of the product is so hard that it’s very difficult for acetone to penetrate. So it just, it’s a lot harder on your natural nails and gel. There’s also builder gel, which is extremely popular with professionals. But I believe the technique is honestly a little bit too advanced for normal DIY people because it’s not just painting. You have to like build it on your nail. It’s beautiful if you can use it correctly, but I’ve never even tried it because it looked, it was too intimidating to me. Consider myself pretty well versed in doing my own nails, and it was still too intimate for me.
All of those solutions are for people that have nails, a length and strength that is reliable to them. If you don’t have nails and you want nails, you’re going to use some kind of product that gives an extension. You can do extensions with dip powder. I will say that doing extensions with dip powder was the most complicated, tiresome, time consuming process I’ve ever tried for extensions. And I do not recommend for anyone really have to get the little tips. Not only is it really hard to get them a fix, you actually have to like there usually like this long and you have to shave them all down, which requires so much drilling, so much violent would do my nails and it would literally take me 8 hours to do them. And that’s not even exagger duration.
There’s poly gel process is literally like using a thicker gel product and then using a mold that forms the tip of the nail. And then again, there’s a ton of filing and drilling down and getting them all uniform. I just didn’t feel like I would be successful doing that. I never even tried that. And with both of those methods, there is so much dust, which is honestly the No. 1 thing that can trigger a gel allergy, is inhaling these products into your lung. I get to the gel exception solutions, which our product falls into that category. There is one more solution that doesn’t really fall under the salon quality genre, that is press on nails. And press ons are a very convenient and easy option that is attainable for most people. But there are some cons as well. For one con that I see people talking about with press on Nell’s longevity, that they pop off too much. And while press on nails honestly look great, most of the time, they’re just not salon quality because of the way that they glue onto your nail. There’s usually like a ridge around the entire edge of the press on nail. And they get snagged, they get stuck in your hair. It’s just not a fun sensory experience. The press on nails are notorious for being hard to find the right sizes in the way that they package them, they don’t put very many of the different sizes in there. So oftentimes, you’ll have a badly fitting nail on your fingers, which makes them look clunky. If they do have all the best nails, you’re spending a lot of your time sorting through them all, trying to find the right fit for your fingers, which just such a pain. And we have the final solution in the extension category, which is gel extension. And honestly, when I discovered gel extensions, I got really excited, literally thought this was the solution I’d been looking for, for years. And in a way, it was. But when I ordered my first gel extensions kit and actually used it, I was surprised by how many things it felt like no one had thought through the application process at all because it basically didn’t end up saving me anytime. So for those of you that don’t know, the entire concept of a gel extension is basically having some kind of transparent full coverage nail tip. So basically like press on nail that’s transparent so that when you put the glue underneath this and apply it to your nail, the light can cure through the nail and harden the glue underneath.
But since I’m a short nail kind of girl, I ordered the shortest nails that the company made. And whenever I got them, they were still so excessively long that I couldn’t even function. And that was a little bit easier to apply a gel extension than it was to apply like a dip powder extension. Once I got the extension on, they were still so excessively long that I had to file them and drill them down until I got them into the perfect shape. And even then, they’re clear, which means I still have to paint them just to get a basic manicure. It would take me hours just to get a base coat. And I thought there has got to be a better way.
So that’s why I created canvas. I set out on a mission to create a gel extension system that was so easy to use, that was so foolproof that it was basically about the same as putting on a press on nail, but with salon quality results. And I know that I might be biased, but I believe we’ve accomplished that. The system truly blows every other gel extension system out of the water. For the only system on the market that has custom sizes, where you literally size your nails one time with our Sizer tool, which has three times as many sizes as most of our competitors, by the way. And once you have your sizes, you’re going to get only the nails that are custom made for you delivered right to your door, having to weed through a bunch of nails trying to figure out which ones fit because they will be the perfect fit every time.
First of all, our system requires no filing ever. No more dust creation, no more spending hours trying to shape your nails into the perfect size. They arrive in the shape and link that you want them. You don’t have to work for it.
And maybe even best of all, we have figured out the exact transparency ratio to make sure that the light can cure through your nail and still allow you enough opacity so that you have a base manicure. As soon as you put your nails on. Imagine never having to paint your nails again with products that are designed to be as clean as possible to give salon quality results while minimizing the risk of any gel allergen exposure as much as possible. For a DIY, that is exactly what we have done with canvas. You’re a DIY nail girly. You may know all of this already, but if you didn’t, now you know. Yes, there are lots of nail solutions on the market, but none of them compare with canvas.