Have you noticed your nails have stopped getting better? They seem to just stay the same. You keep making the same mistakes and the polish still gets on your skin and everything still looks similar. When this happens, it can sometimes feel like you are not improving and that you are just wasting your time. When you hit a plateau it can mean that what you are doing has become second nature to your hand. It could just be that you keep doing the same things and that is how your hand has decided to remember what to do when you are practicing.
One of the most common reasons you can hit a plateau in practice is that you stop paying attention to what you are doing. It is so easy to keep going on autopilot and just repeat the same movements without really checking if they are the correct ones. This is something that is so easy to forget when you first start to get better and things start going your way! The biggest mistake people usually do is trying to speed through the whole practice to break a plateau. What often happens in these kinds of cases is they just try and do so much that it all starts to get confusing and messy! If you struggle in practice and feel like you aren’t improving it is usually a good idea to break down what you’re working on into smaller chunks. If polish application keeps getting in the way, then spend your practice session only working on getting the right approach of your brush for cuticle work and sidewalls. That way instead of working on a whole manicure, you are breaking the whole thing down to a more manageable and focused session.
It can sometimes also be hard to tell exactly what is going wrong and where it needs fixing. Sometimes the plateaus can be really tricky! Sometimes, the way the nail looks when you have done the whole process isn’t always enough to tell you the reason why you are doing what you are doing. Instead, it can help to take a step back and focus on the smallest details you can control. If the finish looks lumpy, practice only using less product without worrying too much about the overall decoration or finish. If the left nail is worse than the right, spend one session working on only one nail to focus on what is causing those uneven areas. It can also be useful to practice specific small details, to compare your nails, and see if you can notice what was wrong. You can work on specific things, like the left sidewall, the product thickness, the free-edge, and only two nails, compare the results under the light, think about what you would change to fix that problem and practice again on two more nails. If you still don’t know why your nail looks that way, take a photo of it and wait until you can see it clearly later. Sometimes, distance helps to see better.
It can sometimes also be tricky to understand when you’ve improved as often it seems that as time goes on and you keep improving, it gets harder and harder to notice small changes in your nails. That’s why it is good to look at your small wins as proof of your nail art skills! Sometimes, you don’t necessarily notice a huge improvement as it might look like you still make the same mistake. But that is because often we look at those early wins and think they will be more noticeable as we are learning new things. The later you go, it’s much more likely your nails start to even out and the polish gets cleaner, it’s just that they aren’t always that noticeable straight away. This is because the improvement in your nails is smaller as time goes on, but they are still improvements!
As your skills become more and more refined, you will notice that you are slowly making your nails better. And don’t worry too much about the bigger mistakes as you will still make those! It is often good to keep reminding yourself that the nail work depends on making smaller steps to get better and so don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t notice big things getting better. If you start practicing your nails and it just looks the same, then instead of making your nails look worse because you were pushing harder, you need to work a bit slower and less so you can get a better result!
You don’t need to work on so many nails or use as much product. Sometimes, you just need to be slower and focus more on the details of each part, which makes it more likely that things will start to improve in your practice. If you find yourself practicing more or harder on some things and it isn’t working, then you just need to be more careful. Sometimes, it might help to change what you are practicing, what you can improve, slow down, or be more aware of what you are doing to be able to correct yourself. It’s often not a breakthrough but just knowing that you were doing that part wrong and changing it.