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: Flower Power!

This whole back-to-work thing is seriously kicking my ass, but I was determined to keep the mood up this week … and try my hand, and patience, and general lack of being able to cope with not being perfect at something the first time I try it, to some nail art.

I even made it a fun challenge for myself by DIYing my tools instead of forking out for a commercial, professional, probaby-quite-a-bit-easier-to-use product.

Yep, I have the tiniest of issues with tempting fate.

But it all paid off, and voila:  flowers!  On ma nails!

Base:  Avon Nailwear Pro in Vivid Violet
Flowers:  OPI The “IT” Colour and Come To Poppy
Tools:  basic kitchen skewers, such as may be acquired in a $2 Shop or similar for not much money.

I am indebted to the many, many nail tutorials to be found on Google, and thankful for the fact I live in an age where (as a pretty well-off middle-class girl in NZ) I can just type “diy nail dotting tool” into a field and receive near-instantaneous response.

To the nails!

The process is simple enough, in writing:  apply two coats of your base colour, let it dry while watching Boardwalk Empire because if you don’t have your attention on something awesome you’ll get up and start doing something and ruin your nails.

Take your first flower colour, in this case the yellow, and remove the brush.  I rather pedantically scraped off as much excess polish as I could back into the bottle.

Using the blunt end of the wooden skewer, dip into the polish, not picking up too much colour, and create circles of five dots, with the edges just touching.  Some people then do all kinds of adorable stuff with the spiky end of the skewer, but my technique is not nearly advanced enough for that at this stage.

Depending on your polish or the size of your dots or any other random variable, you may wish to put a yellow dot in the centre just to make sure everything’s covered.

I did a flower on each thumb, and two random fingers on each hand.  With this colour scheme, adorable randomness totally works.

Wait for the petals to dry.  Keep waiting.  Put on more Boardwalk Empire, or maybe some Mythbusters.

Then repeat the same process with the pink polish, only you’re just doing one dot in the centre of each flower.  I considered not doing this stage since the amorphous yellow blobs looked quite sweet on their own, but the need to practise more dotting won the day.

Keep waiting some more!

And some more!

And when you’re done, apply topcoat.  Nails love topcoat.

It’s happy and fun, and it really annoys my partner, who cannot handle the whimsical non-matchy-ness.  He’s a systematic kind of guy.  But the whimsy relieves you of having to be too perfect – it would just look disconnected to have perfectly-symmetrical absolutely-even flowers trying to look like a twee child’s painting.

I’m now pondering how it would look in much closer colours, like three different pinks/reds, or something very monochrome, or going hell for leather and doing different base/petal/core combinations on each finger.

I’m thinking it would look awesome.

Nails o’ the Week: Accio summer!

After a fairly ridiculously glorious, sunny Christmas nationwide, the gods of Kiwi weather decided to punish us mortals with ridiculously bad, rainy, humid, flood-inducing weather over the New Year.

Something to brighten the mood was in order, and thus bright yellow nail polish was purchased.

OPI’s The “IT” Colour, to be precise.

It was partnered with a highly pretty new frock courtesy of that extremely speedy ASOS order for New Year’s festivities, but more on those later!

Upside:  wonderful, bright, annoyingly-cheerful yellow shade.

Downside:  possibly just an effect of my very-white nail tips and very-dark nail beds, but this was a two-thick-layers or three-thin-layers job, and once you added base and top coat the result was a slightly squishy finish which got dented pretty quickly.

But no one was looking that closely anyway!

Nails o’ the week: Watermelon nails

The second colour to feature from my 3-for-2 OPI swag was Come to Poppy, an exceedingly cheerful bright pink shade.

I also recently purchased two cheap-and-dirty mini “MIKI” polishes from the pharmacy near my work, in a metallic-royal-blue and a bright-pastel-green.  At 2 for $5 I figure I only have to use them once in a blue moon to get value for money!

The inspiration was a tad obvious: bright-pastel-green + bright pink = watermelon!  So here we go.

I almost stopped at the first step, because Come to Poppy is just so happy and bright and in-your-face.  But I had a duty to myself to try to pull off the look I’d decided on, and I always need more practice freehanding French manicures.

The difference in quality between the two polishes was reeeeeeeeeeeeeally obvious once I started applying the green; it’s a lot more watery, and tends to leak out slightly at the edges, meaning you don’t get a perfect line.  It’s also less opaque, so I ended up re-applying the green a day or so later, after these photos were taken.

The old rule applies, though:  almost no one is going to be examining your nails as closely, and from as short a distance, as you are when you’re applying your polish.  If they are, they should be at a perfect scratching distance.

In a perfect world, I would own black and white polishes in order to dot on some seeds and draw a super-thin line of rind between the pink and green, but alas, our world is not perfect.  And the only real downside of that is that when you have a vaguely red-and-green nail look going in early/mid-December, you end up answering a lot of “Have you done your nails like that for Christmas?” questions …

These are not Christmas nails.  Christmas nails are next week.

For more watermelon manicures, check out the mighty Google.  They would put mine to shame, except that mine’s, like, conceptual or abstract or something.

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.

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.

Nails o’ the week: shattering, um, waitresses

My first ever OPI was I’m Not Really A Waitress, a gift from my BFF who is queen of all things nail-related (hopefully we’ll be getting a guest post from her in the not-too-distant future, so my mere mortal manicure skills can be put to shame).

It’s an amazing berry-red which I am totally in love with: not too fire-engine red but still with an impact.

What did I do with it last week?  Covered it in Black Shatter, of course!

(Now, of course, OPI have gone and released Gold Shatter.  I know I told myself previously that I really only needed black, it would go with everything, I wouldn’t really use any other colours often enough to justify the purchase … but.)

I also took a before-and-after of the shatter without a topcoat, and the shatter with.

I like my nails good and light-reflecty, so I would always advocate for a topcoat.  Plus, there’s that whole protecting-your-polish, avoiding-chipping side of things.  But if you like a matte colour, go without!  Any cosmetic which serves multiple purposes is all good in my books.

As I noted in my shattering lilac post, having a fairly dark colour under a black shatter across the whole hand can look a little dark, especially for work attire and especially when your nails are getting a bit longer. (God, could I put enough qualifications in that sentence?)

But it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and since I own a lot of red clothing I managed to wear enough red-centred outfits that the black didn’t dominate too much.  I’d definitely do this look again when my nails get stubby (and guess what happened after this look was on for three-four days?  Cursed breakage!).