Nails of the week: Disney Princess style

I finally decided to try my hand (as it were) at a tape manicure, inspired by the definitely-more-artistic-than-I posts on the topic at Out Damn Swatch!

First mistake:  picking a glitter polish for the base.  Because what you really need as a rank amateur in the field of tape manicuration is the extra level of difficulty involving in getting the damn tape to stick to your damn nails.

But I persevered!  Somehow I was quite enamoured with the combination of pink glittery base (OPI Excuse Moi!) and dark red tip (tee hee) (OPI Not Really A Waitress).  At least I had the sense to go for a straight-up French manicure-style effect rather than, well … sheesh, way to make us all feel massively undertalented.

Two pics are presented of the final results, one with flash and one without, since it was night and my indoor lighting is horrid for photography.  All things considered, I was okay with how it looked; there was a saving grace to the glitter, which was that just as it doesn’t show chipping too badly, it doesn’t show (that much) how the tape totally wasn’t stuck down properly on my index fingernail.

It was about a day or two into wearing it that I realised I was totally channelling the Disney Princess merchandising line.  But I chose to rock it.

I’m thinking of something more ambitious for next week.  Let’s see how that goes.

Nails o’ the week catchup: Sparkletoast

It feels like I haven’t posted about my nails in ages, and the poor dears are starting to think I don’t love them.  And I do, especially now I’ve discovered what a difference pampering the living crap out of your cuticles can do.

So this was a fairly demure, totally work-appropriate look – i.e. two coasts of OPI Chicago Champagne Toast – jazzed up ever so slightly with a single coat of Excuse Moi! over a coat of CCT to slightly take the edge off the pink.

The flash shot makes it look very red, but since I was shooting in rubbish light in my lounge in the evening (who swallowed the spider to catch the fly, etc) I wanted to give some comparison to the slightly washed-out pics.

I spent a good deal of time while waiting for this to dry pondering why the ring finger is so often used for the “accent” nail in manicures.  It’s probably part psychology, part practicality.  It’s not going to be the middle finger for obvious reasons …

Nails o’ the week: Rosy Rainbow Connection

Following on from last week’s glitter-tastic extravaganza of sparkle, I felt like something a little toned down.

But still glittery.

Inspiration suddenly hit me:  since the main thing people seem to say about OPI’s Rainbow Connection is “the glitter’s not that thick, but if you layer it up/dab it on/scrape it along the edge of your nail …” – why don’t I try taking OPI at their word and using the polish just as it comes out of the bottle?

And just to keep things really dialled back after pairing it with a bright, warm yellow, I picked Avon Speed Dry+ in Adoring Rose.

So it was topcoat, two coats of Adoring Rose, and then, squinting one eye to control my natural put-glitter-everywhere tendencies, I just swept the Rainbow Connection over the top in one clean stroke.

And went back after it had tried to do a second coat on some nails, just to ensure even glitter-distribution.

The fact is, Rainbow Connection is a fussy, inconsistent little bastard polish.  As I went from nail to nail I noticed the glitter seemed to get thicker with repeated brush-dips – except for a few times when all the glitter ran away and hid.  It certainly wasn’t the simplest of processes to end up with a good, uniform result – but it was very pretty, maybe even a little too whimsical.

Compared to the bright yellow and the thicker application, the lighter base coat brought out the different colours in the glitter a little better, rather than being predominantly silver with a few flashes of green/blue/pink.

Verdict: happy!  But still questing to discover the One True Way to wear Rainbow Connection.  My life is so hard!

Nails o’ the week: sweet glittering yellow brightness!

This was not my original nail plan for the week.  My original plan involved my supercheap, as-yet-unused pharmacy-bargain-bin MIKI blue shade and some kind of belated celebration of the New York Giants’ well-deserved victory (sucks to be you, Bill Belicheat.)

But as you can see from the pic things got off to a bad enough start when after 3 layers we were not in sight of reaching anything like the shade it is in the bottle, and things went downhill from there.

Ah well, $2.50 down the drain, boo hoo.

*reloads from previous save point*

So.  I must admit to having shamelessly stolen this idea from Astra, but rather upped the ante on vivid cheerful shout-it-out-loud brightness.  Dark-plum-and-glitter may be edgy and gothic (in the literary sense) and stunning and all, but I wanted to show absolutely no restraint.

Besides, my mood was already a tad low from the previous nailfail, so in one of my regular bids to pep myself up through fashion choices, I went with OPI The “IT” Color and tried my hand at some gradient layering with Rainbow Connection.

I think it went well.

Things were definitely helped by the fact that Rainbow Connection applies so thinly if you just brush it on like a normal polish.  To get the tips opaque with glitter, I put the brush perpendicular to the end of the nail and just scraped the glitter off like you would scrape excess polish off on the side of the bottle.

Downsides:  the extra thickness of glitter on the tips got a tad annoying as the days went on (I think the extra thickness there was even messing with my dexterity, and that’s poor enough at the best of times) so eventually I just peeled the whole darn thing off.  The silver lining there is that once you’ve slathered on enough layers of Rainbow Connection, peeling it off is the easy part.  If your nails forgive you.

Nails o’ the week: MEEP MEEP MEEP

The next three nails o’ the week post (including a bumper Christmas special, ’cause I’m cheesy like that) all have their origin story in my weekly supermarket shop.

See, there’s a Unichem pharmacy right next to the local Countdown, and it so happened one week that my partner needed to get something there before our exciting grocery adventure commenced.

And they had an OPI stand.

And the rest was history.

First it was the amazing Glamour Toes set for $40.  This sale came complete with comments on how my skin tone would totally suit this shade, and this shade was what the shop assistant herself was wearing, and she could recommend this shade too for long-lasting wear.

A fortnight later, just when I was in need of a pick-me-up?  It was a three-for-two sale, complete with multiple shop assistants remembering me and my previous purchase and asking if the Excuse Moi had worked out and being helpful-pushy without being annoying-pushy.

And thus was this fool quite happily parted from her money!

I was tossing up on getting some wild ‘n’ wacky shades, but as I said, a pick-me-up was needed and that meant plugging the gaps in my range of reddish pinks.  From left to right, the shades are Chicago Champagne Toast, Come to Poppy, and Meep Meep Meep.

First up?  Well, my partner is a bit of a massive Beaker fan, so it wasn’t much of a contest.

I was a bit worried when I returned home with my purchases and lined them up with my existing collection that Meep Meep Meep might be too close to I’m Not Really A Waitress, which is basically my if-I-could-only-wear-one-colour-for-the-rest-of-my-life number one pick.  So that wouldn’t be too much of a bad thing.

But I was happily suprised!  It’s a bit darker, more red than berry, and has a wonderful subtle light-red shimmer to it which gives it more depth than Waitress.  It’s also a lot more subdued than the other full-on glitters in the Muppets collection!

The shimmer shows best on the bottle in my photos, but it’s just as clear on the nails in real life.

As I’m repeatedly discovering with these fancy new polishes, the price for the extra depth of colour and dimension is that removal is a bit more of a hassle.  But nowhere near the hassle of Excuse Moi, so for now, while I’ll be loyal to my Waitress, Meep Meep Meep is a definite option when I want a change … but not too much of a change.

Chippin’ away

So, when I applied my first go at Excuse Moi! on a fine Sunday afternoon in front of the telly, I decided to pay attention to how well it lasted, on the gut assumption that a glitter would chip more quickly or more easily that a smooth-consistency polish.

Here are the results!  Photos taken on a Thursday, after a hard week’s typing, nervous picking at things, desperately resisting the urge to see if my nail polish was peeling yet, and tending to two guinea pigs.

The big benefit of the glitter’s busy-ness, when it starts to chip, is that you don’t notice the little marks and irregularities, the way you do when it’s a smooth, precise coat of a single colour or a crisp French manicure line.

But by the end of the week the chips were getting plenty bigger and definitely noticeable – if only to me!  But really, the gap around the base of my ridiculously-fast-growing nails was probably the most obvious issue.

Biggest issue:  my Gods it was a pain in the butt to remove.  I had to resort to pouring out some nail polish remover into a bowl and soaking each hand in turn, which my skin did not appreciate, and then scraping off the remaining bits of glitter on Saturday morning after a hot shower.

Possibly an acetone remover would do a better job, but given I’ve just bought a fresh bottle of acetone-free I’ll probably go for the easy option and save the glitter for special occasions.

Nails o’ the week: Excuse Moi!

Having landed myself some Muppets OPI it was probably a bit predictable that at least one of the colours would be adorning my nails within 24 hours.

And here it is, a basic two layers of Excuse Moi!

It goes on pretty easily and dries veeeeeery quickly – I  went back to touch up one nail about a minute after application and ended up doing the whole second coat right then since it was dry enough.

It’s a much lighter pink than it looks on the bottle – I actually bought it on the basis of the sample in the store which showed off the bright baby pink very well as the shade in the bottle didn’t grab me so much.

I was also a bit surprised at the other glitters – they go on a lot more  like glitter-in-a-clear-base and would work much better over a bright top coat (the women in the store were trying to sell me on the Christmas-theme possibilities of a red undercoat with Fresh Frog of Bel Aira green undercoat with Gettin’ Miss Piggy With It – now that’s clever marketing!) whereas Excuse Moi would drown anything under it.

Now the test of how well it’ll last – I’ll let you know at the end of the week (and hopefully not too soon!)

On the future purchases front, I was surprisingly tempted by Warm & Fozzie, which is a lovely warm brown- I’ve always had a bit of a hate-on for brown, but somehow this didn’t set it off.  And Meep Meep Meep is definitely on the cards, if only because the partner finds the name hilarious and instictively makes a Beaker face whenever I say it.

Saturday swag

Sometimes you just need a good hearty impulse-purchase after a hard week’s work.  And when the Johnsonville Countdown has a Unichem next to it, and you’re waiting for your partner to buy boring chemisty things, and you notice there’s an OPI display …

Well, basically the stars align and suddenly you’re in possession of new shiny things.

That’s a “Glamour Toes” set of Rainbow Connection and Excuse Moi with gratuitously-bedazzled toe separators.  Not that those are going to come in too handy for my own tiny stubby toes, but even then it’s still $40 for two fullsize bottles of limited-edition Muppety goodness.

There were two other sets, and I was somewhat tempted by the scarlet duo of Animal-istic and Gettin’ Miss Piggy With It, but I already have a lovely red and really … impulse purchases are always better when they’re just a bit silly.

Stay tuned for uber-glittery nails o’ the week posts featuring these beauties!  In the meantime, the eternal quest for stockings grinds on …

Wednesday Wanty: Muppet-themed OPI

No, your eyes do not deceive you.  Muppet.  Themed.  OPI.  Nail polish.  Three of which are named in honour of the queen icon of fatshion, Miss Piggy.

Need I really say more?