I think I have recovered enough from my trip(s) that I can be coherent  :)

It’s amazing how fast the time goes. It’s already April and IBS Las Vegas is literally just around the corner. I’ll blog more about that later, but right now I want to show you more pictures from Germany and write a little about what it was like to judge.

It was really exciting for me to be behind the curtain for once, and I have a much better appreciation for what our judges do here. Day one was the International Gel Championship and there were 18 competitors. Day two was the International Liquid and Powder championship with 25 entries.

We had six judges and each one of us judged all 11 categories for each competitor — that’s a lot huh? Well, wait I’ll tell you more.

The judges have a criterion, which is what defines a correct competition nail. This is having straight lateral sidewalls, product flush to the natural nail at the cuticle area, and so on. For each category, the judges can give up to 10 points.

For one correct nail — 1 point

10 correct nails — 10 points

Zero correct nails — no points

This is the best way to eliminate opinions from scoring, because one person’s favorite nail may not be another person’s favorite. So we follow the criteria and look for the correct nails. It takes just one minute to judge one category (and keep in mind we have to look at all 10 fingers so one minute is really fast). And we have 11 categories per competitor, with 18-25 competitors — I’m sure you can do the math here. We’re talking 3.3 to 4.5 hours!!!! Whoa.

So before we started judging, the director told us we would have about 2.5 hours to judge. Well of course we exceeded that. We started judging at 12 noon each day and finished at about 3 or 3:30 pm. But that was still plenty of time before the awards ceremony at 4:30 pm.

All in all, I really had a great time. It was such fun to be there amongst my peers and see all the great work everyone submitted. Trade shows are such a blast. It doesn’t matter if you go to Florida or Dusseldorf or wherever, but you should at least go to one trade show a year.

Here are the winners from the International Liquid and Powder championship

1^st place: Ekatarina Raskutina, Russia

2^nd place: Trang Nguyen, USA

3^rd place: Alexandra Snóbl, Hungary

( I wasn’t able to get a pic of this one)

— Lynn