Essie: Sleek Sticks - "So Haute!"

I received six of the Essie Sleek Sticks Nail Appliques as part of my prize as an Essie Girl a few months ago. I never really got around to trying them and I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to like them. My experience with nail stickers (not including water decals or real nail polish decals!) isn't the best and I prefer real nail polish. But I decided to try my favorite design called "So Haute!", which is a textured red with small golden dots. It looks really elegant and it is definitely a design I would want to wear. Since these are (probably) made for people who don't have a lot of time and want to have beautiful nails for a long time, I wanted to wear them for some time to get a good opinion. They're advertised to last up to 10 days. So what I have for you today are pictures right after the application, pictures after one day and pictures after two days. 

First off: To my surprise the application was super easy. Against my expectations, they were quite flexible and I could easily fit them on my nails with almost no wrinkles at all. The part that keeps me from using stickers is filing off the excess. This just goes against all my principles of doing nail art, because it will most definitely leave you with what looks like tip wear and a ripped design. For what it's worth, this can be overlooked if you use a matching nail polish to cover the tips of your nails. That's what I did and this is how they looked super cool for about one day. After that time, the stickers started to tear and they got caught in my hair and everywhere all of the time. So on the second day I decided to use top coat, even if I read that this was going to ruin the design (on blogs, not as an advice from Essie!). Well, it did really look worse with top coat, the textured effect disappeared and weird wrinkles appeared all over the design. The picture from Day 2 is with one coat of Essie - Let It Shine. Removal was really easy and the nails were in no way damaged. 

So this is a lovely idea for a short special event. But which event is so special that you want to spend CHF ~20 /~10 € on nail stickers? And if it is that special, wouldn't it be cooler to have your own design, which will last more than just a day and is way cheaper? 

New, right after application

After 1 day

After 2 days, with top coat (Essie - Let It Shine)