Legend of Zelda Triforce Nail Art

Just to, you know, really drive it in that I'm a huge geek.

Let me tell you a little story about my first Legend of Zelda experience. I was 12 and I was staying at my dad's apartment for the weekend. I had brought my Nintendo 64 over for entertainment purposes (not that he wasn't entertaining, exactly, he was just studying to be a paramedic) and we had rented Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I haaaated it. My problem was that I couldn't find the frigging Kokiri Sword. I played for all of 20 minutes, decided the game was lame, and went about my life.

Fast forward a year; waiting at a bus stop with my friend from elementary school's big scary sister. I was a freshman in high school and I didn't belong anywhere. This big scary sister and I started talking video games, and she lauded about a game called Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was like, girl, whaaaat? That's shit's lame. And she's like NO. So she let me borrow it (and helped me with the sword) and thus began the most epic journey of my life up to that point and a best-friendship that's still intact to this day.

We defeated Ganondorf during New Year's Eve of 1999/New Year's Day 2000. EPIC.

Ocarina of Time is very near and dear to my heart (I say it's my favorite video game of all time but I'm pretty sure that's just in a sentimental way... it's definitely in my top 3). That's the end of my story.

Courage! Wisdom! Power! I know I'm holding a GameCube controller here (I don't know where my N64 controller is, thanks) but just go with it. Windwaker was pretty great too, if we're going to get all crazy about it.

Colors used were:
Zoya - Storm & Raven
Sinful Colors - Ruby Mine & Emerald Envy
Ciate - True Blue
OPI - Oy-Another Polish Joke!

I was going to freehand the Marks of the Goddesses instead of just the individual Triforce bits but I just so happen to be taking a medicine that makes my hands kind of shaky, which is also super awesome for doing nail art.

I was going to re-take the pictures after I reviewed them because I kind of hated how they turned out, but I was going to do it after we went to the grocery store. But then something suck-filled happened, which you can read about tomorrow </3 

Colors by Llarowe - Young Turks and The Mighty Red Baron Stripe Nail Art

I bought Young Turks and The Mighty Red Baron a few weeks ago and somehow haven't done anything with either of them despite their awesomeness. I also bought Sally Hansen - Lick-O-Rich (bluuuughhh) for $.90 at Big Lots to use pretty much for this exact reason. I love texture stripes over regular polish. I heart it!

I used two coats each of Young Turks and The Mighty Red Baron, applied the tape, then carefully painted on one coat of Lick-O-Rich (the formula for the Colors by Llarowe polishes is freaking spectacular, by the way).

I wish my nails were, you know, the same length and all. I have no idea for what occasion I could possibly wear these (oh, you know, a funeral maybe... job interview...) but I like them. And I like feeling them. Since stopping biting my nails I've become a nail-messer-with. I fidget around with them constantly. Texture polish is like tactile crack to me.

The mooore you knooow!

Leaf NOTD (China Glaze: Budding Romance & Striping Tape)

Firstsies, this is the best picture I have ever taken of my nails, or possibly anything:

"I'm Leafnails and I approve this picture."

Secondsies, it took me 948293841983749 tries before actually coming up with something leaf-inspired that didn't suuuuck. And it was the least, like, doing-things idea that I had the whole time.

Totally real pine cone.

I wasn't smart enough to do a toot-torial, but I can explain things super good so here you go.

How-to-do Leafs! <3
Step 1: Put striping tape on your bare nails in a leaf way.
Step 2: Paint your nails a leaf color.
(Optional Step 2.5: Keep going over the polish until you accidentally start dragging it to the edge of the nail but by some stroke of luck it totally works for what you're doing. Make sure you cannot successfully duplicate that happy accident on any other nail.)
Step 3: Don't let the polish dry all the way because it's getting late and you're tired and have already tried 948293841983749 things.
Step 4: Remove striping tape.
Step 5: Use acetone to fix all of the wonky parts from the goopy polish gooping all over the place.
Step 6: TOP COAT TIMMMMMEEEEE.

My nails are so stained. It's pretty horrendous. But!, that kind of worked out for this. Plus Budding Romance is, like, the perfect shade for leaves-just-about-to-turn for Autumn. I love that it's more yellow-toned the less layers of it there are. I don't like green polish usually, but this is my jam.

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!

  

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.

OPI: DS Illuminate Swatch

I'm seriously addicted to dusty hunting. I live in NE Ohio so there's a nail salon like every twenty feet. We don't have a lot going on around these parts, you know? I ran a few errands the other day and in between doing things I needed to do I would stop at every salon along the way. Lots of places don't sell their polish which can be a bummer, especially when one employee says "sure, go ahead and look" and I find something awesome and then the owner, I presume, says "only for customers!". I'm technically a customer, right? I mean, clearly nobody has gotten their nails done with that color in at least three hundred years... just sell it to meeeeee.

So that's almost what happened with DS Illuminate, here. I walked in and seriously the whole wall of this place was just filled with every brand of nail polish you can think of. Of course I was told that the polishes weren't for sale. I thanked her and started to walk out. "Well, I do have just a few polishes I could sell, since they're doubles of ones I already have". Fair enough!

DS Illuminate immediately caught my eye. I knew it wasn't from the older series because of the scattered holographic-ness, but I thought it was beautiful all the same. She had a couple other OPI and a China Glaze that I didn't love but am considering going back for now that I've looked at them swatched. Anyway, here ya'll!

Do you like my fancy nail polish display stage?

DS Illuminate is a burnt umber shade with copper-shining flecks and tiny holographic glitter and oh, also, it shimmers green. It looks likes if a bunch of sand got sunburned, took a refreshing shower in a rainbow waterfall and then, um, put on moisturizer made from the tears of mermaids.

The little triangle friends are SP Robin's Egg. I use that color a lot I guess

This is in the tiny amount of sunlight I was given before this big, stupid cloud came and made it all shady for about nine millennia. Sunny all morning. Go to swatch. Big stupid cloud. But anyway, does it not look like I dipped my fingertips in the melted skin of a bronze god?

In the shade

Note the bit of nail sticking out over my finger in the top right corner! Growth!

And the culprit. Look how stupid it is.

So that's that. I'm not even calling this a review because it's, you know, not one. Basically I'm just raving about how pretty this polish is. This is the first manicure I've done in months that I've kept for more than -a- day. 

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.