I recently received some LED light nail strips from
OMG nail strips to try out, which are a super fun and totally pointless nail art accent.
In case you haven't heard about LED light nail strips, let me tell you about them first. These nail strips can be applied just like regular nail strips, and they have a small electrical circuit with a LED light in it that responds to NFC devices. NFC stands for Near Field Communication and it is given off by most newer Android phones, point of sale machines (called Pay-wave here in Australia) and other things that I discovered, which I will share in this post and another.
The OMG brand LED Nail strips come in three colours, red, blue and white. I had the white ones. They come in a pack of one LED strips and a selection of nail art stickers with holes in them that you can place over the nail strip.
For this mani I decided to create a galaxy mani with a twinkling star. You can see the star with the tiny LED light on my middle finger.
These are a bit thicker than regular nail art strips, but they still sit very thin. I did have trouble with getting the strip to stick to my base polish, but I think that is because of the polish I chose (which was a new black peel off base coat from Dance Legend). Because of this you will notice that my video below has the LED at the bottom part of my nail, and my finished mani has it at the top part of my nail. I ended up peeling off the nail I originally painted in my video, gently cleaning it and reapplying it. I then applied two layers of gel polish to ensure it was well stuck down.
The packaging recommends that you apply a gel top coat to protect the LED and ensure the strip is well secured, and it certainly worked well for me considering there was no stickiness left of the nail strip from when I cleaned it. But I did end up with a much thicker middle finger. It is worth noting that I have worn another mani with these LED strips which I will show another time where I didn't use a gel top coat, but just applied the strip to my bare nail, and that worked perfectly fine.
No lets get to the fun part and see it in action. My biggest problem with these was that I have an iphone, and iphones don't have NFC! I knew a colleague at work had a Samsung Galaxy S6 so I was happy I could film my nail in action at work. But of course I wanted to see it working at home as I was doing my mani, so that's when I started googling NFC devices. I discovered that there was one thing in my house that had NFC, and it was my son's Skylanders Portal for the Wii. This little platform usually holds the game figurines and powers different characters through the game, and it turns out it uses NFC to do it all.
This video shows the LED sticker in action over the Skylanders portal, then me applying the sticker. I super quick tutorial of a galaxy mani - noting how I left the LED light uncovered by polish and finally it flashing in action next to the phone.
I would think these strips are going to be single use, I tried very hard to carefully soak my gel nail off and remove any left over polish, but the protective rubber cover to the strip ended up peeling off and disconnecting some of the connections in the LED light so it no longer worked. With the mani that I didn't wear a gel top coat over (still to come) I was able to remove it and save the LED circuit, but I'm not sure if it will still work in another mani after using plenty of acetone on it.
These LED light nail stickers are from OMG Nail Strips and are $5.99 per pack - with each pack containing a single LED light nail sticker.
Nail stickers provided for review.
