champagne wishes and caviar dreams

My sincerest apologies for my hiatus. Between moving out at school and staring up work for the summer I have been rather busy. If you can't already tell from the picture above, moving out was rather rough on my nails...my pointer finger nail was absolutely destroyed and I broke two nails on my left hand. Too bad I'm not legit enough to avoid household duties like this crazy hand model here. Despite the damage done to my nails recently, I'm back posting. 

o I know the caviar manicure has been out for a little while now, and is all the rage considering the 3D nail art trends. The actual ciaté caviar manicure costs $25 at Sephora, which is rather steep even for a polish fanatic like myself. I had seen a number of DIYs online before the product was released and had wanted to try it out myself, but wasn't able to find a small enough substitute for the ciaté pearls. This week when I was at Michael's picking up some scrapbooking things I stumbled across Recollection's microbeads. For $6 I got a set of 6 different colored beads. 

To start I used one coat of butter LONDON's nail foundation flawless basecoat followed by one coat of  butter's Union Jack Black. Next, one nail at a time, I applied a coat of SV topcoat. While the topcoat was still wet I dipped the nail in the black beads, completely covering the nail. After removing it from the beads I gently pressed the beads into the polish and removed any excess beads from around the nail. After letting the nails set for about 20 minutes the beads were quite immobile. Initially I was worried that this mani would be inconvenient with the beads catching on my hair and clothes or falling off continuously throughout the day. I was however really pleased to be proven wrong. After two days of day to day activities--showering, hand washing, dressing, working out, and doing my hair--my nails are still fully covered! Perhaps because they are so densely covered and the beads are so small they haven't been catching on anything. I absolutely love wearing plain black nail polish, but because I'm a nail blogger and thus am expected to always be updating my nails, I rarely have an excuse for a solid black look. Fortunately with the caviar mani, I can rock the black look with an added edge. What do you think of the caviar mani? Trendy or too much??