This past weekend I thought I had a great idea – use contact cement to glue on my fake nails. I thought it would speed up the process and last forever! It wouldn’t loosen in water and would stay until my natural nail grew out. WRONG!!!
Contact cement is great for many things – it attached the plank to the platform in my turtle’s tank and has lasted through him climbing on it over and over and it remains submerged in water all the time after all. This is why I had high hopes for it to secure my nails.
I applied the CC to each nail on my left hand with a small watercolor paintbrush. I also applied the CC to the back of each fake nail This was all easy and quick. I waited 5-10 minutes for the CC to dry then stuck on each nail – pausing on each to press the nail to finger for a bit.
I then applied the fake nails to my real nails on my right hand using my regular method of filing the nail, applying nail glue to both finger nail and fake nail then pressing and holding each together one at a time.
By the next morning, the nails on my left hand were loose and one completely fell off. This showed me that my contact cement experiment was a complete failure. I shoved some nail glue around the edges of the nails and hoped for the best.
You can also see that contact cement causes a yellow hue to show through the nails (right side of the page). This is not cute at all and may make others think you have a fungus issue. 
Bottom line: Contact cement is not the genius solution I was hoping for. 😦
I will say the one positive is that when the nails do come off, the cement is easily removed by simply rubbing your finger on it so that it balls up and pulls right off. This removal leaves no damage to your natural nail. So perhaps if you are looking for nails to last only a couple of hours, contact cement is the way to go.
Aimee Knows 