Review: Essie Sleek Stick nail appliques 'Embrace the Lace'

Today I'm reviewing Essie's nail polish stickers in the pattern 'Embrace the Lace.'  According to the package, these nail polish appliques are UV cured to look like a gel finish and are long lasting. I wanted to try these guys out because though I love painting my nails, I would love being able to create patterned manis at home.
I found this pack of nail stickers at Bed Bath and Beyond for $9.99. They come in this sleek package complete with directions, a file, and a cuticle pusher:

My first frustration with this stuff: The package only comes with 18 sticker nails.  The reason for the excess in stickers (I do only have 10 fingers, ya know!) is that the size of each sticker nail varies so you can best fit a sticker to your nail.  This is nice but it means I have 8 extra nail stick ons.... Why not include 20 appliqués in the package so there are two sets included??? That's frustrating. For $9.99 I feel like two more stick ons could have been added to this set.

There they are in all their glory. The directions are pretty simple. Clean your nails, peel off a sticker that fits whatever nail you're working on, align the sticker and press firmly onto your nail. Then you fold the excess over your nail tip and file it off.
Simple, right?
Negatory, folks. Applying these nails is, indeed, relatively simple. However, making them look good? Now that's an entirely different story.  No matter how firmly I pressed these stickers onto my nails, there were bubbles and ridges near my cuticles. Not cute.  Here is the best I could get these to look:

Notice the wrinkles by the cuticles? I hate that! It makes it utterly obvious that I put a sticker on my nails!
Other than not looking as perfect as I would have preferred, I found that the wear time of these stick-ons was not long. Even though I followed the instructions and folded the excess applique over the tip of my nail and filed it off, the edge of the sticker started receding up the tip of my nail.  This thing is super sticky so dirt and other nastiness started building up at my nail tips.  I had to peel these guys off at the end of the second day of wearing them.  They only look cute from a distance away where you can't see the wrinkles and folds in the sticker, and that little bit of cuteness was not worth the gunk build-up.

Overall, I think this product was a major fail. $10 for two days of half-attractive wear? Not worth it in my opinion.
xxSJ