Shellac: a review with pictures

     My husband gave me a gift certificate to a local nail salon and I decided to use part of it to try Shellac. All I knew about it was that it was supposed to last longer than traditional polish. I heard you have to have healthy nails in order to have it applied...it is a system. By "system," I mean they have a certain way that they have to apply it, which looked technical, but I didn't pay too much attention other than noticing it was applied in "layers" with the color you chose, and a clear polish of sorts, and with the intermittent use of a UV light.
After it was applied, I really liked it. It looked shiny and gave my nails a thicker appearance. In addition to the cost of the manicure, I think the Shellac was an extra $15. (Note: Forgive the lack of beauty of my hands, I am not a hand model :)
Here is what it looked like right after being applied:

Within a week of having a manicure with REGULAR polish, it is definitely chipping, if not more like a few days. But, here is what the Shellac looked like a week after having it applied:

It still looked great...absolutely no chips and still very shiny. I did notice my nails were already growing, and started to wonder if I would have to remove the polish because of chips, or because of the new growth. Here is what they looked like at about 11 days in, so not quite two weeks. Notice more nail growth, polish still looks great, but nail growth is bothering me a bit:

After 2 weeks and a couple days, I noticed a small chip:

I want to add that though there was indeed a chip, that part of that one nail is shaped funny and curves downward (see picture below)...since that was the first/only chip at that point, I wondered if it had to do with the odd shape of my nail in that spot: 

2 days later (today, after the polish had been on for a total of 19 days, 2 days short of 3 weeks), I noticed a chip on another nail on the same hand:

Here is a picture of my other hand, which is still looked great as far as the polish goes (again, the new growth was really not cute to me at this point): 

So, I decided to go ahead and remove the polish at home. I used acetone, cotton balls, and strips of foil: 

First, I applied some acetone to the cotton ball and laid on my nail:

Then wrapped them up in a strip of foil: 

Pretty hands with foil fingers ;) I let them sit like this for about 10 minutes before I started pulling it all off. Oh! And I did one hand at a time: 

After about 10 minutes when I started pulling the cotton/foil off, the polish either came right off on the cotton, or a few of them looked like this: 

For the ones that looked this way, it was super easy to just scrape the remaining polish off with my other nails: 

I was afraid my nails might be all torn up, but once everything was removed, I washed my hands and here is what they look like: 

They aren't totally smooth, but they actually look pretty good. I don't like long nails, so they will be filed down and I may add a clear coat to them, and they will be just fine. 

So, to sum it up, I would totally do the Shellac again. I love the way it stayed chip free and shiny so long. In fact, my only complaint was that my nails were growing too fast. Also, I don't think it took much more effort to remove than regular nail polish. They had So many colors to choose from, and now I am dreaming up my next color scheme :)