Sean McWard

Hi, I'm Alisha Rimando and welcome to Back to Basics. In this series, we're going to talk about cover pink powders. And yes, we're talking about liquid monomer and polymer powders... and polymer powders have been around for a very long time actually, since the early 90's and have changed colors, they've gone from clear in your basic natural colors all the way to vibrant reds and yellows, but there was another kind of twist in how colored powders went... they went down the road of calling themselves cover pinks or camouflage powders and the reason why we did that, was when they were invented they were invented to actually cover flaws in the natural nail.

You can see throughout the history... ... fast forward from the mid 90's all the way to you 2023 and here we are with loads of cover pink powders. There's a lot of different colors of pinks out there, but cover pinks are actually natural or nude or skin-toned pink colors and they're meant to cover the flaws in the natural nail, extend the nail bed and really be able to bring out the beauty in the natural nail.

As we go through this series, I'm going to show you some different cover pink powders. I'm going to show you some opaque ones, some that are a little bit more translucent and I want to show you the different ways to use those powders to get the best look for your clients. I also want to show you a way to extend the nail bed, so those clients that have bitten nails and want that perfect French, it's really hard to get it on them, but with a cover pink powder you can make a beautiful French nail on anybody and then... at the end of this series, I'm actually going to show you how to make that perfect French using cover pink powders, because that can be a little tricky too. So I welcome you to join this series and watch our first episode where I'm going to talk to you about all the different colored powders that there are.

So, I remember when cover powders were first made, we were in Japan, Tom Holcomb and I, we used to go over there a lot and spent a lot of time there teaching classes and they would always push us, push us, push us to come up with something new. so every time we were over there we were having to create a new design or come up with a new technique or something that would make it worth us traveling all the way over there and doing that...it was constantly coming up with something.

So we'd been over there a couple of weeks and we finally met in the same city and he was in the hotel room grinding up these powders and I was like, 'What are you doing?' I remember he had mixed colored powders like that with pigments he found in Japan and he's like, 'I'm going to make this pink powder that is going to be the same color your nail bed so

I can fix all the flaws in the natural nail so I can make a perfect French'. And back then a competition French was like 'the thing'. It's the hardest thing. It still is the hardest thing to do, to make 10 perfect smile lines and 10 perfect nails, but the biggest part and the hardest part of that, is actually having the perfect nails to start with, so if you have flaws in the nail, you learn as you compete, when there's flaws in the nail you have to work harder to make it perfect.

You know, you have to fix this side of the smile line or you have to make all of them shorter, because one of them's too short, so you have to match them all up. So the nail beds are all the same.

So with this new powder that he called, Back To Reality, you could extend that nail bed just a little bit, fix that side, cover that flaw and make every single one of the nail beds look perfect, so that when you were going to do French, then everything was perfect. He ground up all these powders, all these different colored pink powders and tried them all on my nail beds until he got the perfect consistency and the perfect color and then we competed and of course, he won as always, and at the time there were no rules that you couldn't use a cover pink powder or that you could, it was all translucent and then soon after we went to Germany, we won that as well.

And he ended up changing even the white into... he put a couple drops of color drops in there, that were a yellow, so that it would just... into the monomer, so that it would just slightly yellow the white, so it looked really, really natural and beautiful and then we went to Winba in Anaheim and competed there too.

So that was kind of the beginning of what is now cover pink powders and obviously, you know, it was an amazing idea, because now with all of the different cover pinks you're able to match anybody's skin tone and you can, if you spend the time to get that right match and make it beautiful, you can cover the flaws in the natural nail without covering the natural nail, we don't want it to look fake. You don't want to look like a mannequin or a Barbie doll.

You want it to look very smooth and natural and so that's how they were made and that's why they were made, to make the natural nail look as perfect as it could.

When you start looking at all the different colors of cover pinks... I'm going to test some different ones and one of the things that you're going to want to think about is, you want some that give you really good coverage. You want some others to give you some coverage, and then you also want to have that sheer pink and I think that that's really important too, to show the sheer pink. So, I wanted to go ahead and get this little palette here to test these out.

There's one color of our pinks and I'm just going to let that sit there for a second. I'm not drying out any of these to see what they look like.

So that we can determine what we need and how we're going to use it. Now the whole point in creating cover pink powders, when they were created was to cover up flaws in the natural nail. So I really want to look at how to cover things up, but then also, making it look natural. So I personally prefer something that will give us some coverage...like this.

Gives us coverage, but then it's like when you're doing your make-up. So your concealer isn't necessarily exactly the same color as your face. It's more of something that's going to be a little heavier. Sometimes it could be a contour color and it's going to be darker, so you can shade or maybe a lighter color, so you can highlight.

And then your foundation colors... adding a little bit of color, but just to lightly cover what you're trying to cover. So I'm going to go ahead and dry this out because you know that the drier it is and the less liquid that's inside, the more opaque the product will become, so you can see this is the exact color.

But because we dried this bead out, it looks very different from this one. So we're getting a little bit more coverage. So that's what you want to think about too, is how you're going to put the bead down. And how you're going to get more coverage? And then at some points, not adding any, not drying it out at all and maybe even adding a little bit of extra liquid is going to give you more of that sheer.

So you want to know how to use those products before you start putting them on your client, so we can figure out exactly what we're going to do. So I can see that this has more white and more opaqueness than, let's say, this one does.

But I like this color too. And depending upon our model, we can see that even that peachy color looks really pretty on her, that pinky color. So these three, are the three colors i'm going to use to get the look that I'm looking for.

So now that you've seen the difference between opaque and the difference between translucent and how you're adding monomer, so that you can create that perfect shade for your client...in the next episode I'll show you how to cover the flaws in the natural nail and show you how to blend that perfectly, just like you're putting concealer or foundation on someone's face. So come back and see me on the next episode.