I Tried the 1,000 Layer Nail Polish Challenge | Style Theory

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If you’re one of the 50 million people who watched the @simplynailogical videos putting on 100+ coats of nail polish, then you know nails can get pretty out of control. Well, we decided to take the 100 layers challenge idea and kick it up a notch by trying to apply 1,000+ layers of nail polish to a hand. Can it be done? Can we make nail art pretty enough to go viral on TikTok? Will HopeScope end up reacting to this “satisfying” creation? And will we reach the top of #PolishMountain? Today, loyal Theorists, we find out in this ultimate nails challenge!

Watch Simply Nailogical’s Challenge ► https://youtu.be/EWHV5IxDuB0?si=gmbINyuBv-wveUSh
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#NailArt #NailPolish #Nails #NailDesign #NailTutorial #Challenge #Challenges #SimplyNailogical #ViralTikTok #ViralChallenge #Theory #StyleTheory #MatPat

Take a look at your hands. You ever wondered what it’d be like to wear ten layers of nail polish? A hundred? What about a thousand? Well, you don’t have to wonder anymore because I did it.

I wore a thousand layers of nail polish for 24 hours and, spoiler alert, it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Style Theory, the show that nails it every single episode.

Speaking of episodes, if you missed it, I made a big announcement over on Game Theory this week that you should probably go watch and check out after you’re finished with this episode. It is a doozy, and it’s very important

For the future of this channel, but trust me, it’s gonna be a fun ride. I’ll even leave a link in the end card to make it easy for ya. Good luck not crying during the last five minutes, friends. Anyway, let’s get back to the topic at hand, shall we? Nail polish.

When it comes to nail polish, I’ve always been a bit of a newbie. But secretly, I’ve always been jealous about those who get to dip their toes and fingers into the polish game. So in honor of New Year, New Me,

There’s no better time to crack open a bottle and become the nail fluencer of my dreams. But of course, because of the special way in which I’m broken, I can’t just settle for painting my nails like a normal person. I need to go deeper. I need to show another layer of the story.

And that’s when it hit me. You might recall back in 2016 when the channel Simply Nailogical, a.k.a. Cristine, did a challenge on her channel painting over a hundred layers of nail polish, which took her over 12 hours of constant painting. The results were as beautiful as they were terrifying.

Now, over the years, Cristine has returned to one-up the challenge and pushed the limits of how many layers of nail polish you can realistically wear. She even tried her hands, both literally and figuratively, at a thousand-layer challenge, but was so horrified by the Freddy Krueger nightmare that she created,

She kept the whole thing a secret from her audience for over six years. But you know what? If I’m gonna take my own journey to Polish Mountain, I’m gonna need to find a way

To take this and make it even more extreme. I need to do something that not even Cristine was able to do before. I need to take this monstrous creation out into the world to see if this trend can hold up to the labors of real life.

And I’m gonna do it with both hands. That being said, if I’m actually gonna be able to do this, I’m gonna need some help. So I asked two members of Team Theorist, Josiah and Rachel, to give me a hand.

Or, uh, rather, I gave them each of my hands. Their job? Get paid to spend the day painting my nails until we reached 1,000 layers of polish. Then I’ll rock my new mani as I go about my normal day. I’ll take meetings, I’ll eat, I’ll, uh, ha, use the facilities.

And to just add a little bit to the drama, we’re gonna make it a competition. Josiah vs. Rachel. Analytics vs. HR. We’re gonna be grading their work based on three criteria. Beauty, livability, and durability.

And at the end of the day, we’re gonna be crowning one of them Theorists King or Queen of Polish Mountain. Place your bets now, loyal Theorists, because as the team settled in for the long days of painting, I immediately realized that I might have made a mistake in my choice of nail technicians.

I was gonna say, Josiah, how did you get roped into this? Everybody was coming to me like, oh, Josiah, here, you can paint some nails. And of course, I was like, yeah, I can do that for sure. Who started a rumor that you could paint nails? I don’t know.

I mean, your fingers are very nicely manicured. Well, thank you, thank you. I take pride in that. How many layers of nail polish have you done in the past? Under two. Alright, well, get ready, because we got a 999 more to go. How about you, Rachel? What’s your nail polish experience?

I have done more than two. Okay. Layers. I’m a nail biter, so I always got fake nails. Fantastic. So on one hand, I have someone who only uses fake nails, and on the other hand, I have Josiah, who lied his way into the salon chair.

Already, this was turning out to be a lot more of a challenge than I anticipated. But with my questionable draft picks aside, it was time to get to painting. Lucky for me, the shoot day actually lined up with the longest meeting of the week,

A FNAF catch-up with everyone’s favorite Brit, Game Theory Creative Director, Tom. Welcome to the morning meeting. Though, I do want to let you know that I’m joined on this call today with Rachel and Josiah. They’re going to be painting my nails.

Despite the initial surprise, Tom was a really good sport about the two meeting crashers, and we finally got to the good stuff, the painting. Right off the bat, it became clear that our two competitors were going to be moving at two very different paces.

You see, Josiah, he’s a very meticulous kind of guy. He focuses on all those little details, which, let me tell you, is a great trait to have for someone who manages our analytics. But when it comes to painting nails, yeah, that thoroughness is going to come at the cost of speed.

Meanwhile, Rachel, she’s a speed demon. Her normal job around the office requires her to focus on efficiency over artistry. She can’t be spending all day writing a soliloquy for one email when she might have hundreds more piling up in her inbox. So from the word go, Rachel took off at a lightning pace.

I watched in real time as Josiah was left in the dust, finishing his first perfectly painted nail as Rachel sped past him. I love that Rachel’s already on nail three and Josiah just… He’s trying it so hard. But never one to back down from a challenge,

Josiah had some wise words to share with the class. Have you guys ever heard the story of the tortoise and the hare? No, tell me how it goes, Josiah. And tell us he did, in long, excruciating detail. There’s a tortoise. He’s the slow guy.

Yeah, that does tend to go with the territory, yeah. And then there’s the hare. He’s the fast guy. The tortoise just takes his time. He focuses on all the little steps. And he gets to the finish line before the hare. I’ll spare you the rest.

But the analogy fits our challengers pretty darn well. We have the tortoise, Josiah, slowly and carefully making sure each layer of polish is perfect. And then we have Rachel, the hare, moving at full speed to reach the thousand layer goal quickly.

I guess we’re gonna have to wait until the end of the episode when we tally up the scores to find out which method proves to be the best. But in the meantime, let me know down in the comments. Are you team tortoise or team hare? Go, go, Josiah or rah, rah, Rachel?

So with our literature lesson out of the way, I was finally able to get to the task at hand. Solving the lore of Glamrock Bonnie. While being glammed up myself. Except there may have been one other small, tiny detail that I might have underestimated. Time.

In the original challenge, Cristine was able to get to 100 layers as fast as possible. She didn’t need to worry about building a solid structure that would last all day. Meaning she wasn’t sitting around waiting for the polish to fully dry in between coats.

And even then, it still took her over 8 hours to get through 100 layers. Based on the clips from her unreleased video, her attempts at 1000 layers looked like they took her days. Note to self, my confidence might have been a little bit over eager in the initial time estimate.

So if I’m planning on wearing these babies out, I need to make sure that the nails are structurally sound in order to get through our entire day of testing. That means waiting the full dry time in between each coat of polish. How long’s that you might ask?

But for our experiment, we ended up using Sally Henson’s Insta-Dry Polish. Because according to the packaging, it only takes about 60 seconds to fully dry. On average, our hare Rachel, she was able to paint a layer of polish on each of the five fingers in 30 seconds.

Making her full paint and dry time for one layer a minute and a half. On its own, that’s a really fast process. But once you start multiplying that by the goal of 1000 layers, suddenly we’re talking about 25 hours of solid painting. No pausing for eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom.

And that’s just talking about our fast competitor. We’d all be dead in our graves by the time Tortoise Josiah got even halfway up his mountain. This was turning out to be a disaster, so we were left with two options. Either call it quits on the episode, or come up with a new solution.

And we here at Team Theorist, we never know when to quit. So we decided to divide and conquer. Josiah and Rachel each had a week to find a new way to make the episode possible.

Me, I was busy trying to figure out the answer to the question that caused all this trouble in the first place. Why the heck does it take so long for nail polish to dry? Looking back now, I realize that I just assumed I knew how nail polish worked.

At least, at the base coat level. Paint goes on the nail, paint dries, apply more paint. But boy, oh boy, was I wrong. Broadly speaking, your typical nail polish contains seven different kinds of ingredients. There’s a resin that’s made to ensure that your polish sticks to your nail bed.

Then there are the pigments, which mix together to give the nail polish its unique color. But the main ingredient is actually a film-forming polymer, usually made of nitrocellulose. These sorts of polymers are long chains of smaller molecules that combine to form films that you see sitting on top of your nails.

It starts out in that liquid-like state, but as your nail polish dries, that soft polymer chain hardens to form a solid film on top of the nail. Speaking of drying, though, that still doesn’t explain the big question of why it takes nails so long to dry.

It actually comes down to one key ingredient, the solvent. If you’ve seen our episode on the spray-on dress, you probably already know what a solvent does. The solvent, like ethyl or butyl acetate, is a liquid that all of the other ingredients are suspended in until you brush the paint onto your nails.

Once applied, the solvent evaporates, leaving behind that solid, beautiful polish. And it’s that evaporation we’re waiting on when the nails are drying. It’s also responsible for that trademark nail polish smell. Side note, after this episode, I will be glad to never have to smell nail polish ever again.

But while nail polish might smell terrible, you know what’s gonna make your day smell a whole lot better? The sponsor for today’s episode, Scentbird. Here’s a little peek behind the scenes for ya. When you spend a week locked in an office with two people racing to paint a thousand layers of nail polish,

That chemical stank starts to seep into your clothing and clinging to your skin. It followed me everywhere for days after this shoot, even after trying to wash it off in the shower. So when Scentbird reached out wanting to sponsor us again, my response was yes. Please, oh please.

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Which brings us back to the problem at hand, and on my hand, dry time. If you look online for advice about how to speed up the nail drying process, you’ll find a wide host of drying hacks. Ranging from the helpful to the downright wacky.

Really, going through each of these could be an episode all its own. But it turns out that the fastest way to dry your nail polish is actually the simplest. Layer size. By painting each layer as thinly as possible, you maximize the solvent’s ability to evaporate.

Putting polish on thick with extra C’s prevents the solvent deep within the giant glob of nail polish from being able to escape and dry the nail. But did our tortoise and hare end up being able to figure that one out?

It’s been a week since I sent them scurrying off to save the episode, so let’s see what solutions they found. We are back one week later. What did you guys come up with? Wow, are you ready for this? Elbow length gloves.

Hold up, so you’re saying that the solution to the problem was flesh gloves? Yeah. Yep, flesh gloves. Flesh gloves. They actually got their inspiration from none other than the OG herself, Cristine. As we see in the clips of her last video, Cristine decided to paint on Edward,

Her trusty mannequin hand, in order to paint over the course of several days. Genius! But for our purposes, we couldn’t be wearing a mannequin hand. So Josiah and Rachel found the next best thing. Uncomfortably realistic latex gloves molded to look like human hands.

These things look like they’re ripped straight out of Silence of the Lambs. Happy birthday to me, I guess. Oh, did I not mention the fact that all of this, me donning these nightmare gloves for the sake of your entertainment, was happening on my birthday? Yeehaw! That’s a memorable one.

Anyway, all they had to do was glue some of Rachel’s fake acrylic nails onto these guys, and boom! A portable nail painting setup worthy of a thousand layers of polish. We did get a thousand layers, didn’t we? We did our best. You did do all five fingers. Yeah. On both hands? Yes.

200 layers plus a layer of super glue. That’s what Josiah got, actually. I got to 157 and a layer of super glue. Well, would you look at that? Turns out Aesop’s fable repeats itself again. Our resident tortoise was able to do more layers of nail polish. One point to Josiah.

In total, across both hands, I was wearing a little over a thousand layers, so the letter of the challenge had been met, but the spirit of the challenge, eh, not so much. That said, Josiah and Rachel did paint a full set of hands each,

Meaning that while we could only wear two hands at a time, we did technically reach 2,000 layers in total across all the hands. That right there, that deserves a big old round of applause. Ugh, that is disturbing in all the worst nightmare fuel stored aways.

Speaking of those nightmare hands, let’s reveal what we got. Who should go first? Oh no! So disturbing for so many reasons. I mean this in the most loving way possible, Rachel. When did you know things were going wrong? Not as soon as you think. There was still hope for a while.

They’re a lot more bendable and flexible than I expected. Nail polish, you’ve dumbfounded me yet again. Because there is actually a good reason for the nails to feel squishy. You see, as we mentioned earlier, once the solvent dries, what’s left on your nail is that solid polymer film that’s incredibly brittle.

In order to prevent that nail from chipping immediately, polish manufacturers add ingredients collectively known as plasticizers. Their job is to make the nail more flexible, so it can withstand the regular wear and tear of daily life. Now, of course, when you add over a hundred layers of polish to your fingernails,

All those plasticizers, they’re gonna end up making your nail feel like a giant wad of paint. And you don’t have to take my word for it either. You can see it for yourself the next time you put on nail polish. Wait a couple days and feel the squish yourself.

But that wasn’t the only thing that held up Rachel’s nails. So I had a little tiny fan. I had it blowing on, and so, most times with the fan, once I would do all five, it would be dry enough where I could kind of just go. Did you catch her two big mistakes?

In our resident hair’s desire to speedrun this process, she didn’t give the recommended 60 seconds for the nails to dry. She also used a fan, which I’m sure felt like it was speeding things up, but unfortunately, it likely made her polish mountain less stable.

The air would firm the topmost layer of the current coat, and Rachel, feeling that top layer to see if the coat was dry, would think that it was safe to move on, when in reality, the inner part of the coat was still wet. But that’s only one of our challengers.

Let’s compare Rachel’s creation with hand number two, made by the tortoise himself, Josiah. Tortoise, what do you have to show for yourself? Oh my God, that’s great! Actually, no offense, you did an amazing job. You just have to say that you’re fine when you’re not really fine.

You can see the beautiful layers of the nails. Josiah’s solid layers came from using one bottle of polish at a time, while Rachel’s more Jackson Pollock look came from rotating colors every single coat. How long did each layer take you? As we saw last week, I was a lot slower.

Yeah, Josiah didn’t have any secret trick up his sleeve, he just took his time, like any good tortoise should. And in terms of nail drying, this was proof that the true key to drying is patience. But I have to commend both of our

Contestants for being good sports about the whole thing. And now, finally, we get to the best part, the part where I get to strap on these gloves and put these puppies to the test. After several failed attempts to get these weird,

Fleshy gloves on, it was time to see what the office had to say. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, we’re gonna be deciding the ultimate winner for this clash of the nails by judging the tortoise and the hare across three separate categories.

Beauty, livability, and durability. Since the last two categories will kind of reveal themselves as the day goes on, let’s just start with beauty. While my first reactions were not the most flattering to one set of nails, that’s just my opinion.

I decided to take a tour around the office to ask everyone what they thought of the aesthetic of both sets and nails, and then rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. 5 being beautiful, 1 being nightmare fuel. Let’s just start off with our resident Michigan grandpa, Sam.

He’s the perfect person to ask for an unbiased opinion because he has no filter. I’m looking for your opinion here. This scale doesn’t need to go up to 5. This person tried. I would say this is a 2 and that’s a 1. See what I mean?

You ever need someone to tell you like it truly is, get yourself a Sam. So that’s an early lead for Team Tortoise and Josiah, but now it’s time to move over to Style Theory Creative Director Amy, who is working behind the scenes to help set up this entire

Episode. Here’s her first reaction to seeing the nails in the flesh. Or, I suppose, the latex. I know you had a hand to play in this. Oh, what do you think?

I think I might have found my new sleep paralysis demon. Honestly, I have to give at least a 1. 1 is the lowest. I actually hate that. Amy was so confused by Rachel’s handiwork that she could barely articulate the rating of 1.

What did she think of Josiah’s though? If Salvador Dali was a nail artist, this is what they would be. I give it a solid 3. Shocking. Salvador Dali beats sleep paralysis demon. Score 1 for the melting clocks.

But of all the opinions around the office, none matters more to me than the opinion of my loved one, my partner in crime, Stephanie. Hey, Stephanie. So, Stephanie, you might have noticed that I’ve done something a little bit different.

Wow, this is New Year, New You? We’re getting on the New Year, New You trend a little bit early. Okay. Well, I meant like it’s your birthday today. Is that canon to whatever we’re shooting? That is canon, actually. We are filming this literally on my birthday. These are my birthday nails, actually.

So I’m going around the office and asking people to rate my nails on a scale of 1 to 5. 5 being, wow, they’re so beautiful. I want them for myself. Wait, 5 isn’t nailed it? I don’t feel like 1 to 5 really encapsulates the feelings of these nails.

Like there should be some other scale from the deeply negative numbers to almost break even. If I have to give like an actual numerical score, I would give these like a 0.5 and then these, I think they are more believable in like a high fashion setting. I would give them a 3.5.

3.5, wow. Checking in on our scores for this round, it’s clear that Team Tortoise walks away with a big W. In other words, Josiah moves ahead in the race to conquer Polish Mountain with a total score of 2-zip.

But every story has itself a silver lining. While most of the office did have a negative reaction to my nails, there was one member of the team who seemed to really like them. Good ol’ Skip.

But there’s no time for messing around here, Skip. We got two more categories to judge. Next up, livability. I’m gonna go about my normal day to see how much these nails are hampering my ability to function as a normal human being. First up, using my phone.

It feels like I’m tapping three different sections of my phone at one time, but my phone’s smart enough to recognize that, so that’s good. But you can see here that my, uh, my thumbs are being blocked. Wow. Nope. That was supposed to be a W. Wow.

Nope. Wow, Sam. Maybe autocorrect was built for people with really long nails. Will. Nope. Five minutes later. Play. This. Soon. That’s, that’s with autocorrect and everything. Nails when it comes to typing on a phone, not solid. But also, I don’t think that’s impacted by the thousand layers of nail polish, right?

I think that’s just like a byproduct of having long nails. Also, if you’re wondering if typing my emails up on my computer was any easier, yeah, no. Come on! After spending an unholy amount of time trying to type one single sentence, I needed to, uh, take a break at the facilities.

And, uh, I’m not really sure who this one was more awkward for, me or the film crew made up of our employees waiting on the other side of the door.

I’ll say that it poked in places that I didn’t expect it to poke, and I was very concerned about the hefty size of the nails scooping up some toilet water as I was going in for the old wipe. That’s TMI, but it’s true. Welcome to the channel.

I don’t think I need to say this out loud, but let’s just say that I very much appreciated the smoothness of Rachel’s nails over the stabbiness of Josiah’s. It’s like I was trying to use a full-on Freddy Krueger claw in there.

I did manage to wash my hands without too much difficulty, thankfully though, in preparation for my next task. A task which you might recognize if you happen to be a regular viewer on the channel. The filming of this episode actually overlapped with the shoot that we were doing for our best toothbrush episode.

Go check that one out if you haven’t already because it is gonna be incredibly useful in your day-to-day life. Anyway, it meant that I got to brush my teeth using these ridiculous talons. Though, much like washing my hands, it wasn’t that bad. Until, of course, I had to check my results.

Excuse me while I reach into my mouth. It’s reaching so far back into my throat. This is terrifying. I can’t see the results. I can’t see my results! I might have to ask someone else to reach their hands into my mouth so I can see my results.

Go figure, no one on the crew volunteered to help their dear old boss examine his face hole. Just can’t find good help these days. But just to add insult to the awkward of this day,

I had a doctor’s appointment and all of a sudden I had to explain why I was wearing a thousand layers of nail polish on awkward flesh-toned skin gloves. I gotta say, first off, driving itself is not hard. I just parked, but the fact that my car has

These buttons instead of like a traditional shifter, that has made it significantly harder because I can’t just like push drive or push reverse. I have to like knuckle it, like knuckle it there, so now I’m in reverse. But overall, this is not making it hard to drive.

I’m wondering if someone who’s more used to wearing kind of like long nails, acrylics, or like, you know, fake nails, they’re gonna be a lot more familiar with how to navigate using these nails than I am, right? That being said, I also see my abilities getting better,

Defaulting more to like finger pad and like knuckles rather than my fingertips. Hardest part so far is taking on and putting off a jacket, and what I’m noticing is my my nails got caught. So I lost a nail on my left hand and this guy over here is definitely on his last legs.

We’ll see how many are left standing by the end of the day. So wish me luck. See you back at the office. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t turn off the video. Nope, it won’t turn off. I gotta tell you, having these nails on all day was surprisingly exhausting.

Not only was I bouncing around doing stuff all day, but my brain was working overtime, having to constantly think about the position of my fingers and think of creative new ways to accomplish what’s normally a very easy automatic task, like using my car or using my phone. It was draining.

It started to dawn on me that people who wear acrylic nails, they’re having to deal with this stuff every day. Obviously not the height issues that I was experiencing, but just the functionality issues. Why? Why would you do that? It’s annoying. It just makes life so much harder.

And so with my head now full of questions, it was time to go enjoy some food with someone who I thought might have all the answers, Steph. For someone who has experience wearing some level of nail, how much more difficult is this versus normal nails?

The difficulty is more just I have big nails now as opposed to I have thick nails. Yeah, so there’s a reason why I don’t have long nails regularly. A lot of our team doesn’t have long nails. Anytime you have to use your hands a lot,

Nails are gonna cause issues. And growing up, like, I never had long nails because you have to play- you can’t play the piano. You can’t play musical instruments. You can’t, like, work outside. You can’t- you can’t do anything. I think the problems that you’re having, all of the problems opening the soda,

Apply no matter how thick or not thick your nails are. I think you’re just, you know, you’re experiencing life on the other side. Those who have to maintain beautiful long nails all the time. The struggles that they go through. Right?

This was, without a doubt, my biggest takeaway that I had coming out of this entire challenge. Not the thousand layers of nail polish part, but just realizing how difficult it is to maintain a long-nailed lifestyle. Look at what I had to do today.

I typed some emails, I ate some burgers, I drove to the doctor’s. None of it’s particularly hard, but I still managed to lose two nails in the process. Now imagine that I had to do something that was actually physically demanding, like gardening or mowing the lawn or doing a lot of child care.

Why would anyone choose to put on nails this long if it meant you couldn’t accomplish basic physical tasks? Well, that right there, that’s actually the whole point. Long nails weren’t meant to be practical, they were meant to be a status symbol. Back in ancient China, fingernails held a huge significance in the culture,

Especially among the upper class. Not only were they the first recorded inventors of nail polish, but long nails held such value in their society that they created elaborate nail guards, often made of precious metals and adorned with gems,

To help keep their long nails from breaking. Both men and women can be seen sporting the long-nailed look, but why? Well, long nails meant that you were wealthy, that you didn’t need to do manual labor.

It signified that you weren’t of the common folk. Over the years, as resources became more readily available and more people had access to things like fake nails, this trend took to the masses, but never lost that luxurious association.

But you know what? All this talk of labor reminded me that my workday wasn’t done yet. We still had to crown a king or queen of Polish Mountain, and Steph had a little surprise plan for our epic finale.

Anyway, lunch is over. It’s time to move on to your surprise. Ready guys? Come on in! Hi! We’re back! Hey! Happy birthday! A party hat? Hey! Yeehaw! It’s your birthday! We’re all partying. And despite all the work, nail polish fumes, and light-hearted jives that I subjected Josiah and Rachel to all day,

They were still kind enough to get me some really thoughtful gifts for my birthday. Considering I hadn’t declared a winner yet, they might have actually just been bribes. Josiah looks like he’s constantly posing for a thumbnail right now. Here, let’s all do the Josiah thumbnail face. You won’t believe what’s inside.

Also, opening birthday cards? Turns out it’s super easy when you have a giant letter opener strapped onto the top of your finger. Rachel, as HR manager, made sure that all the employees got in on the birthday festivities. Aww! Happy birthday from all our loyal employees. They’re like, we swear allegiance.

All the disloyal employees have been jettisoned off the ship. Yeehaw! Woo! YouTube’s number one boy. But someone was a little antsy to shove the sentiment aside and get the show on the road. Not related at all, but there were some final rankings we had to do with the nails. So, who won?

Okay, well, I think when it comes to aesthetics, you know, it was a close race, but I did take a survey of everyone in the office, and I do say that this hand eked out the win on that one. Just by a little bit, though. It was by, like, fractional points.

Yours will live on as a winner in the hearts and nightmares of everyone in the company. I’ll take that. So, really, I feel like that’s a win. Yeah, this is what I provide for the company culture. Yeah, nightmares. There it is. When it came down to livability, the tables had turned.

I gotta say, across the board, these were easier to live with. These guys, a little bit too long, and so they were, you know, when I’m going to the bathroom, they’re poking me in some strange places. This guy, right here, a little bit shorter, a little bit stubbier, I appreciate that.

Whereas these are like the shins of nail art. That meant Rachel was finally on the board, one to two. It all came down to the final category, durability. Either Josiah would run away with the win, or Rachel would force him into a stalemate. If you look across them, across the whole day,

I mean, you’ll see that yours have transformed a fair bit. A little bit. Honestly, I couldn’t tell. Really? This checks out with about how they were. Whereas these guys, they held up pretty well. I gotta say, I lost two fingers on this hand. I’ve only almost lost one finger on this hand.

So I think, at the end of the day, we’ve got to give the win to the tortoise. On a glue technicality that doesn’t even have to do with the painting. So congratulations to Josiah for winning the most ridiculous competition that we’ve ever done across this channel. Which honestly, is saying a lot.

All hail theorist’s king of polish mountain. Long may he reign. And you know what, this might just be the nail polish fumes talking, but I really did accomplish my goal of better understanding the world of nail polish.

I started this journey wanting to attempt a fun challenge and find out if nail polish was really for me. And sure, we took it to some ridiculous extremes, but I think I will try more normal nail polish in the future. Oh, and no offense to Rachel and Josiah,

But they should probably stick to their day jobs and leave the dreams of becoming nail artists to the professionals. Here’s the thing though. At the end of the day, the true loser across the board is me. It’s me. Because I spent my birthday walking around looking like this.

And I had to record myself in the bathroom. You know, honestly, the loser is Ash, who had to listen to the audio coming out of the bathroom as I was doing that. But second to Ash, it was me. But while I’m also a loser, I’m also a winner.

Because I had you guys to share this journey with. So I might be the loser, but I’m also the proudest winner of them all. At the end of the day, the gift that truly keeps on giving is a slate of loyal employees. And not silicone hands covered in nail art.

But remember, that’s just a theory. A style theory. Keep looking sharp. Don’t forget to check out the special offer from our sponsor of today’s episode, Scentbird. Go to scentbird.com and use the code STYLE55 at checkout to get 55% off your first month.

Or click the link down in the description below to take you straight there. Your nose is not gonna wanna miss this one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go spray my entire house with Scentbird to get rid of that horrible nail polish smell. I’ll see you next episode. Got it!