So as some of you may have seen I got a bit bored last night and decided to decorate my hand 🙂 Yes Hand as there was no way was about to attempt creating a design on my Cinderella hand 🙂

So I have had this little pot of Jagua Gel sitting around for a while and thought I should give it a try. This is NOT BLACK HENNA, and I would tell anyone thinking of trying black Henna to stay away from it, as it can cause major allergies due to the PPD (paraphenylenediamine) inside it. Jagua is a natural dye, found in a fruit in South America. It has been used by indigenous tribes in south America for many years for body adornment.  I stumbled across it when looking for temporary tattoos.  I am a big Tattoo fan and have a rather large tattoo on my back and so I wanted to see what this stuff was like.

I ordered my items from Jagua Tattoo and got a kit as I was not sure what exactly I would need, so I took the easy option and purchased a kit. The pro kit is £29.99, ok so not exactly cheap, but it contains a lot of gel so I am sure it would last a while.  The kits range from £7.99, so there is something to suit everyone.

The kit I got comes with stencils, transfer paper, plastic cones, 25 ml of Jagua Gel and Gloves.

The pot comes sealed and here it can be seen below;

Jagua Gel

It has a gooey gel consistency, and they recommend you use it within 3 months of purchase, but I have had mine sitting around for longer than that, but it was still sealed.  I was a bit worried it would not work, but as you can see from my hand in the above pic it worked 🙂

The cone took a little getting used to, and creating a design on my own hand was probably harder than it would be to do it on someone else’s hand.

Jagua Cone applicator

So after carefully filling the cone I got to work.  They give some good advice to work form top left of design down to the bottom right to avoid smudging.  I have to admit I was surprised at how easily I was able to control the flow of the gel, it made it easier than I thought to apply. I would recommend using a glove on the application hand if applying to yourself and on both hands if doing on someone else, it stains everything it touches…So be careful.

Jagua hand decoration (while still wet)

Apologies for the crappy iPhone pic 🙂 As you can see it looks similar to Henna, however it is a lot easier to apply in my opinion, and just peels off once dry, which takes about an hour, and for those who do not like the smell of Henna this is great as it has no real smell at all.

Immediately after removing the gel there wasn’t much sign of my design, but it does state it takes 24-48hrs to develop completely and by the time I had woken this morning it had developed.

Jagua hand decoration

And here it is the finished design, oh and a bit of mess on my thumb, as you can see it takes on a very dark bluish black colour, very much like that of an actual Tattoo.  Just like Henna it develops a darker colour on the rougher parts of the skin, that is why the design on the arm is a lot lighter than that on the hand.

It is meant to last for 10-15 days, much like henna So what do you think?  Will you be experimenting with some Jagua designs?

Thanks for reading xxx