Fishtail Nail Art

Have you ever gone to a spirit/food pairing? It's, uh, pretty great. Andy and I went to one last night at The Winking Lizard, oddly enough. There was kind of this little side room with about 40 people in it at tables at the back of the restaurant. We go there late (of course) and were enthusiastically greeted by Laphroaig Master Ambassador Simon Brooking in all his Scottish-accented glory (swoon for days. Scottish accents are absolutely my favorite accents in all the world) and two delicious Laphroaig 10 Year cocktails as we awkwardly made our way to our seats. It was a four course dinner (Scotch Egg Salad, Maple Glazed Duck Flatbread, Prime Rib with Sweet Potato Frites and Bleu Cheese and Bacon Brussels Sprouts, Hand-made Spicy Chocolate S'more) which were paired with four Laphroaig scotches (10 Year, Triple Wood, 10 year Cask Strength, 18 Year) and it was delicious. I've never been much for scotch (and Laphroaig, by nature, is incredibly smoky and peaty and a little intense to a scotch novice like me) but the event was informative, entertaining and fun. I was definitely a giggly doofus by the end.

Little Bottles of Scotch.

So I saw this fishtail nail art at Vampy Varnish and decided it would be the perfect thing to jazz up my fingies. I hadn't tried the fishtail yet so I was apprehensive at the whole free-handedness of it but it was actually pretty painless, and the result was exactly what I was looking for.

Colors used were:
Literary Lacquer - Some Glad Morning (turquoise)
Colors by Llarowe - Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (blue)
Essie - As Good As Gold (gold)

Taken in direct sunlight with my very fancy vintage Hermes Deux Éperons bracelet that I'm waaay too lower-middle class to properly own.

What do you think? I miss my length but I'm happy to be able to somewhat pull of nail art, if only simple designs, still.

St. Patrick's Day Nail Art

Hey! Hey, guys!

Once upon a time I used to celebrate St. Patrick's Day the only way Americans know how: green wearin' and copious amounts of alcohol starting at the crack of dawn, usually in the form of Killian's, Guinness and Baileys or any creative and shudder-inducing combination of the three. St. Patrick... Patron Saint of hangovers.

Now I'm all old and wrinkly and fun-resenting (but hangover free, bitches!) and I celebrate St. Patrick's Day by making corned beef and cabbage (the recipe is, like, a freaking book and kind of all over the place but i results in DELICIOUS WONDERS). Holidays seem to be the only thing inspiring nail art out of me these days. Meh. Too busy being a grumpy old person I guess.

I started with a base of Essie - Good As Gold and after that was completely dry I used page hole reinforcements to tape off  at the base of each nail. Then I applied two coats of Sinful Colors - Emerald Envy. For the accent nail, I just used my super fancy DIY detail brush and, starting at the cuticle, painted rainbow arches! I had this really great idea to use the reinforcement labels so that the arches would be super crisp and perfect buuuuut no. Nope. Too impatient for that noise.

The rainbow consists of:
Formula X for Sephora - Hyped
Color Club - Wild at Heart
Colors by Llarowe - Young Turks
Sinful Colors - Happy Ending 
Cult Nails - You're My Dandy Lion 
Essie - Meet Me at Sunset 
Colors by Llarowe - The Mighty Red Baron 
..and a coat of Essie G2G

Uh, yep! That's a potato.

Sinful Colors - Pride Swatch & Review

HEY.

I GOT COLORS TODAY.

Sinful Colors - Pride is red and pale yellow and green and blue and magenta hex glitters in varying sizes suspended in a slightly thick, clear base. I have a couple other polishes like this (Ulta - Pinata-Yada-Yada and Milani - Gems) but this one definitely has the best glitter payoff. The formula isn't unbearably thick, either. I feel like this would be perfect for a glitter gradient!

Swatches show Rejuvacote as the base, a thin layer of Essie - Waltz, three medium coats of Pride and no topcoat.

For good measure, I then added a thin layer of Essie - Waltz. I looooove how it dulls the metallic shine of the glitters. This reminded me of a more muted China Glaze - It's a Trap-eze, which I don't yet own but have been considering getting. I have such a thing for glitter in a white base, which I'm sure I've said before.

Party on my nails!! This was, however, a little bulky what with the layers. In the future, I'd probably be a little lighter-handed with Pride and stick to using it as a full-coverage polish as an accent nail or two.

Valentine's Day Gradient Nail Art

I say this a lot, but I don't often have time for nail art-- if I do manage to do any, it's while the kids are napping so I only have around an hour these days. I wanted to do something cutesy and pinksy and heartsy for Valentine's Day since that's what people do, right?

I found a tutorial about sponged gradient hearts (which can be found here) and being that I haven't successfully done a sponge gradient yet, I wanted to go a little bit out of my nail comfort zone (which, I guess, is a thing for me now) and gradate the sh out of my nails. But with a heart for good measure because Valentine's Day!

I used Julep - Joan, Essie - The Girls are Out and Madison Ave-hue for the gradient, and Sinful Colors - Pale for the background of the accent nail. Essie G2G topcoat to finish 'er all up.

 
It's not the most intricate design in the world but for me for V-day, it gets the message across all right. Happy Valentine's Day, guys. If you're not into that sort of thing, happy Day-Before-a-Bunch-of-Chocolate-Goes-On-Sale Day!

Adventures in Nail Stamping: My First Success!

I bought a Konad double-sided stamper and a brand-unknown stamping plate (it's octagonal and is labeled KD28... I googled it and found nothing, and when I googled "Russian Doll stamping plate" a round version of what I had by a company called Nail Craze came up. So I don't know) with the cutest little triplet of Russian Dolls, this winter sweater pattern and a pretty floral pattern (and a mouse? And a flower "sprig," if you will). I wanted to do a fall-themed mani, so this is what I came up with.

I used Hard Candy - Crush on Lava (which is this really neat sort of burgundy-rust to gold duochrome... sort of like Orly - Space Cadet without the blue base) and stamped with Essie - As Good As Gold, then lightly brushed on some Zoya - Maria-Luisa.

It doesn't shift to quite as green of a hue the pictures are showing you in real life. The macro is really the most accurate in terms of color. As Good As Gold was awesome to stamp with. I haven't done a lot of experimenting with stamping yet, so it was nice to actually have something work out pretty early on.

Well, all right. I'm going to go play some GTA5 while the kids are asleep.

Fingr's: Lace Up Nail Art Review

I have a COLD. We're moving in two days and I have a cold. In August.
Here are my nails:

Sunlight, OBVIOUSLY.

I did the gradient using Essie - Meet Me at Sunset (favoriteeee) and Flower - Eye of the Tiger Lily. No sponge nonsense, just a couple layers of Sunset and a slow build up of Tiger Lily towards the tips.

Anyway, then I see these appliques at Wally World and decide to go for it.

Firstly, I know these are probably made for tweens-through-early-20s kinds of ladyfolk, but I have some long, skinny piano player fingers, and the width of the ring finger sticker was still, like, half of what I actually needed. In fact, none of the stickers were wide enough. Seriously, little kid sizes here. 

Application was all fine and well enough. I tried re-positioning the first one and once I started trying to pull the thing off it wasn't having it. Tear city, and some, I don't know, stress discoloration. So whatever. And I had to clip about half of it off since my widdle nay-ools are still-a growin'. 

Can I just tell you how much it bums me out that I don't feel well? I seriously have SO MUCH TO DO. Even writing this, I'm like, "meh". I would so rather just be watching TV and eating Hot Dog Chips (which are SO GOOD and I'm not even getting paid to say so!!!!!!) 

Anyway, so my nails have spots on them, and that picture is AWFUL and there's black sh all over the place from trying to fill in the blanks with black nail art polish and this living room smells like a diaper and I can't figure out why, because there aren't any diapers laying around. LIFE.

Got my Ipsy bag today finally. Happy with it. Will I start posting reviews about that kind of stuff? I MEAN SINCE I HAVE SOOOO MUCH ELSE TO TELL YOU ABOUT. Whatever. I want to take a nap.

Um, the appliques were all right. My nails look pretty neat when they're not all up in my face and I can notice all the insane flaws. OUT.

Striping Tape & Gradients: NOTDs

In the midst of the moving madness, I still find the time to paint my nails. I guess you can probably see my haste, hahaha. Not the best cleanups in the world... Not that it matters. My nails have been chipping like maniacs what with packing and all. No breaks yet! Knock on wood.

First up is a little striping tape action. I don't love striping tape when left on the nail because no matter how careful I am to make sure to cover up the ends with top coat, they always start to peel within like, an hour. But using striping tape to make line designs with layered polish is definitely my currently favorite technique.

Orly - Glitz & Essie - Sunday Funday, sunlight

I've been using the Essie quick dry top coat and I must say, it's a nice change from my insanely gloopy almost-empty bottle of Seche Vite. It's not as, hmm, sturdy (?) feeling as SV, but it still leaves my nails super-shiny and it does dry rather fast.

Barielle - Berry Blue under Hard Candy - Bity Blue & Essie Naughty Nautical, sunlight

I mean, I really love that design, too. It was a Julep NOTD a while ago and she used gold and army green which is really quite lovely too. This got messy, however. Besides my wonky pinky paint-shape, my cuticles were, indeed, blue. Berry Blue is a gooorgeous deep blue, but it bleeds like no other during cleanup. 

SOPI - Is It Payday Yet?, Salon Perfect - Robin's Egg Blue & OPI - Parlez-vous OPI?
Zoya - Maria Luisa (awesomeeee) on my ring finger, sunlight

I joined a new facebook group called Nail Polish Challenge the other day and one of the prompts was pastel gradient. As you can tell, I suck hard at gradient. I understand the technique, but I'm not patient enough to let the first coat dry all the way before sponging on a second layer and it gets all sponge-marky. I like the color combo, though. I'll try this again around Easter, I think. Maybe I won't be so bad at it by then!

I bought Charla and Maria Luisa from Zoya.com a couple days ago. As a new registered user, I got one polish for free which was pretty great. Plus shipping was free too (I think because of a promotion that was running...?) Also, I've discovered pinterest nail polish sales/swaps! Oh nooooo! That just took this obsession to a whole new level!

I also recently did my first swap with the most lovely lady in Canada. She writes a darling fashion blog that you should check out here: bluecollarredlipstick.com. She was super patient with my complete cluelessness about swapping. Plus, she swapped me some really spectacular and HTF polishes!! I can't wait for that package to come. Friendliness really seems to be a trend in the nail polish community. It feels like everybody's rooting for each other and trying to help locate lemmings and things like that. That's not very common on the internet, I've noticed.

Well, have a good weekend, everybody ever!

  

Essie: Shine of the Times

Hey.

It's been a while.

We're in the process of moving. Moving sucks.

Here's a picture of Shine of the Times over Salon Perfect Electric Grape, with Revlon Matte top coat:

And a macro:

Right on. 

My First Franken: Wannabe Essie Starry Starry Night

Edit: I just looked at a bunch of SSN swatch pictures and realized how much farther I still have to go with this, ha ha! (tear)

Got in late to the game. There are tons of gorgeous polishes I'll never be able to find/afford (although I did just buy a new bottle of Peel Me a Gobi Grape at a dusty today on the cheap...) and SSN is one of them. I have come to terms with it.

Using my extensive art background* I decided to take a stab at frankening. These are the polishes I chose to use:

L to R: L'oreal Miss Pixie & Berry Nice, Nina Ultra Pro Silver Slipper,
Wet n Wild Black and Essie Aruba Blue

I started by cleaning out an old Ulta mini bottle. I filled it up about halfsies with Miss Pixie and added a few drops of Black, a few drops of Berry Nice and a buncha drops of Silver Slipper. The result was a sad, sparkly grayish-blue. After quite a bit more Miss Pixie and Black, the polish turned into a desaturated version of SSN. It would have been pretty great if I had some royal blue pigment laying around. But alas. I decided to add a couple blurps of Aruba Blue despite the shimmer.

I don't have any ballz laying about. :'(

In the bottle it kind of just looks like a less dimensional Aruba Blue with silver sparkles all up in it. But on the nail:

Like three coats, Seche Vite'd, in the shade

1. I'm sorry it's my toe and thus cropped funny. I don't have, like, awful toes generally. I just don't moisturize them as much as I should so it's all dry skin looking and ain't nobody want to see that. 

2. It doesn't suck though, right?

Close-up. Ignore the green-stained cuticle area, prty plz

In the shade, it satisfies my lemming. Is that a correct way in which to use that word? Like, my lemming is a creature of some sort and it eats only vhtf polish and if I don't feed it it bites me in my eyes or something.

Sunlight

Buuut as you can see in strong light the Aruba Blue shimmer gets all shimmery which isn't a feature in SSN. But I like it anyway. I'm for sure going to try my hand at frankening more in the future. Because just finding and collecting already existing polish isn't addicting enough.

What am I going to call this? 

*like 3 years of ungraduated-from art school

Adventures in Nail Striping Tape, Round 2

Pinterest, am I right?

After about 2039402934802 posts tagged "Great Gatsby Nails" I found THE prettiest nail tape design ever at Coewless Polish. I implore you to look at it. And now my, um, poorly manufactured knockoff:

Essie - Good as Gold and LA Colors - Fiji Purple, sunlight

I feel like this should sort of be one of those lessons in how not to paint one's nails. I guess, as a first-time experiment, it could have gone worse. Do you notice how the gold is looking pretty pink? That's the Fiji Purple bleeding like a mother after Seche Vite application. I did wear a base coat, but I'm still expecting my nails to be a stained mess after this one.

OKAY and the bubbles. Ohhhhhhh the bubbles. The biggest sigh.

I did this last night while watching a 6-part series called When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions. It bums me out that the US shuttle program got shut down. Do you ever think about how insane it is that man was even able to build a machine that could propel and keep him two-hundred miles away from the planet? In the 1960s, no less! You think about the kind of technology we have now and how archaic and quaint things from the 60s seem and it's mindblowing. It was all trial and error, and yet there were teams of people who dedicated their entire lives to the exploration of the unknown. I tend to romanticize stuff a lot, but things are real bleak when funding for space exploration gets cut. All the things we don't know.

Some life form far away (who, you know, evolved in such a way that the nails on their weird space-hands are these badass weapons... like barbed electrical talons or something) thinks it's just adorable that this bunch of Earth-matrons decorate whatever the dainty, delicate things are that are growing out the ends of their touchy-bits.

I would love to have been an astronaut except that I couldn't be less suited for the job.

Seafoam & Poppy Mani

I was seriously all about this blog in the beginning, okay? And I still intend on being. Just stuff and stuff.

So, nail stuff, then.

I have these Sonia Kashuk hairbrushes that I seriously love the colors of (they were on clearance at my local Target, hay) sooo I decided to paint my nails in one of the brush's, um, honor.

There's some Salon Perfect Robin's Egg (which is more green-hued than what I typically think of robin's egg blue being), a bit of Zoya Raven (which has almost unrecognizable shimmer) and Essie Meet Me at Sunset (which is my favorite color currently, an orange-tinted bright red crelly? I'm clearly confident with my nail polish, like, technicalities...). I first taped the top half of my nail off and did the Robin's Egg, then (impatiently) removed that tape and taped off a little further up for the Raven. I have had absolutely zero percent success with taping over existing polish. I know it's because I don't wait long enough for it to dry. But having done two coats with the tape on, the polish forms a little ridge for me to be able to bump the brush right up against the next color without having to worry too much about the new color going all up on the previous one.

SO ANYWAY MANI INSPIRED BY HAIRBRUSH which should obvs be in some sort of manicure-month thing.

I picked up some pretty rad changes-color-in-the-sunlight polish from Five Below that I'm going to swatch soon. I know you're on the edge of your seat!

Fingr's Striping Tape Manicure Round 2

I used Salon Perfect Robin's Egg and Essie Go Overboard, Seche Vite blah blah blah.

Look at how long my nails are getting. Ha ha. But it's true... I keep catching the tips on, like, everything. I guarantee these mofos are all going to break off within a week of my getting them to a decent length. I'm a clumsy Clara. I somehow forget that it's not only because I bite them that I can't grow them out.

HEY SO I'M THE WORST BLOGGER EVER. I started this as a draft like a week ago, or like, however long it was since my last post. I've done like 239846203984 manicures since then and took pictures of exactly zero of them. Cool!

In other news: my little baby boy turned 1 two days ago! He likes to sit in my completely disorganized bin of polishes and crawl around absconding said polishes and I find them all over the house. Whatever, guys. Don't judge. (Guys... pfft. Me. I already know I'm a hot mess).

Today, also, is MY birthday! I'm about a million years old. No, okay, I'm 28 but that's CRAZY. I was 18 TEN YEARS AGO. Shoot my brains out.

I'm making a swatch book, thanks for asking. I'm using these Post-it page marker thingers and I'll probably never get around to taking any pictures or any of that because of that being an awful blogger thing. 

Fing'rs Striping Tape 90s-Looking Manicure

Happy Wednesday, ya'll. According to the United States Postal Service, my first Julep box is currently in transit to my house. It's the Boho Glam starter box, and neither of the colors like, blew me away online but I liked them more than the other types, so we'll go with it. I'm on the waiting list for Ipsy, too. I have a new weakness for subscription boxes.

I picked up some Fing'rs striping tape the other day and did a super simple manicure using Essie Sand Tropez and Smooth Sailing. I liked it for about eight minutes before it made me think about those pictures you see hanging up in hotels or whatever from the 90s. The flower ones, where the colors are all muted because of them being old and awful. Shudder. I have a real issue with the 90s. That horrible super-yellow cheap-looking gold with pastel turquoise and periwinkle and, like, peach. Barf city.

But anyway, now that I'm looking at the picture I don't hate it as much as I thought I did.

Please excuse my toe-looking ring finger. I have to learn not to press down using that finger, I guess. Plus it's way shinier than the other ones. I should probably cut it off for future photos so you don't have to be subjected to its awkwardness.

But, yeah. Kind of wishing I had given it a chance. Oh well. I love Smooth Sailing by the way. I don't often proclaim my love for periwinkle (after all, periwinkle?!) but this color is so lovely with its silver NO WAIT subtle turquoise and lavender shimmer.

I shall explore this striping tape deal more in the near future, I think.