When I first got to the point in my life where I wanted to paint my fingernails I was still a kid, living at home. Girl, was it obvious that getting rid of the color when you're finished wasn't easy. But if you didn't get it all off, especially around the cuticles, you risked giving yourself away.

When I finally moved out of the house I was able to try fake nails. My mistake was in trying to put them on first and then paint them. Right, those darned cuticles again, not to mention left-handed precision from a right-handed person. The next obvious trick was to paint them before putting them on. This solved the problem for me but provoked another difficulty. In order to hold the blasted things you had to paint one end, let it dry, paint the other end, let it dry and, if you needed a second coat, repeat the process. This leads to some uneven layering which, though usually okay to casual inspection, went against my sensibilities.

How to do it better and faster was the issue. While looking at another TV site the owner of the page offered a method for mounting the nails on individual pegs and painting them. I never found time to implement this. But in the meantime I pondered the matter and arrived at a faster way to handle this chore based on the peg method.

It's really very simple. All you'll need is a 1/2" x 36" dowel rod and some double sided tape. Simply apply a 12" strip of the double sided tape to the side of the dowel rod, near one end. Take your nails and line them up along the tape, polish and let them dry. Apply a second coat if necessary or desired. The extra length of the dowel rod will give you something to stick into some approprate orafice to hold it while it dries.

You can be fairly sloppy with this process but try to keep the nail polish from the underside of the nail if that surface is slightly exposed. You may end up with some color on your own nail, something to be avoided in most circumstances. I also find that a single heavy coat allows the polish to flow smoothly and more evenly, giving a smoother surface.