52-Week Challenge 3/4: Spring!

I'm running so behind on blogging about my manicures. I'm still doing my nails about twice a week, and taking pictures of them, but I've been so crazy busy at work that when I get home I just want to zone out and play Sims3 or read fanfic. I've been doing my nails for the challenge themes, really I have! (Even though I actually either forgot to take pictures of the 2/25 week theme - jelly sandwich - or I have lost them, because I did actually do the challenge theme that week, but I can't find any pictures of it. Bad Ro, no biscuit.)

I originally did this manicure just to highlight the gorgeous Dandy Nails - Piece of Youth, but when my co-workers looked at this manicure, the first word out of their mouth was "Spring!" (at least three of them, separately, squeed about the springy-ness of it, in fact) so I decided it qualified for this week's challenge theme.

This gorgeous glitter is the newest polish in my stash that I received from one of my fabulous exchange group, The Dirty Dozen (March is my month to receive, but she sent me this one early!) I am a US-shipping point for my group members out of the country who'd like to buy things from companies who only ship within the US, so I get to ogle their pretty polishes before I send them on. For the first time, though, this one tempted me soooo badly that I actually opened it and swatched it to see if it looked just as good on a nail (swatch stick) as it did in the bottle.

Turns out Dandy Nails - Piece of Youth? Actually looks BETTER on the nail than it does in the bottle! The bottle looks like the glitters are all clumping, and makes you think they didn't use a very good suspension base. I shook and shook and shook and it still looked like most of the glitter was stuck on one side of the bottle. But when I pulled out the brush and swiped it across the swatch stick? Plenty of glitter there! Pretty smooth placement, too. The microglitter brushed out pretty evenly and I only had to do minor positioning of the larger hexes. Of course, I'm a little OCD about symmetry, so others might not even need to do *any* positioning.

I mentioned to my DD-mate when I let her know her polishes had been shipped on that I had swatched one of them, and let her know how gorgeous I thought it was...so she asked if I'd mind if she bought me one as part of my package, early, and direct-shipped it to me? Did I MIND? Pretties! Pretty pretty pretties! YAY!

Ahem. No, I didn't mind at all. Thanks! :)

I started this manicure off with two coats of China Glaze For Audrey, a color that I don't typically like on its own, because I'm not a fan of greenish-blues, outside of actual, real turquoise stone. Dunno why, really. I don't even remember if I bought For Audrey for myself because this shade was missing from my paint palette, or if someone bought it for me. :P But it matched nearly perfectly with Piece of Youth, so there you go. I put two coats of Piece of Youth on my accent nails and on a taped off triangle on the rest of them. I outlined the taped areas with L.A. Colors BCC 570, and topped the points with a yellow rhinestones, and voila! Pretty springtime sprinkled on my nails! :)

Piece of Youth makes me think of robin eggs, actually, which is probably what contributes to the whole spring-feel of the manicure. I think that's more of a cultural identification, though, since robin eggs in crafts, candy, and pictures, seem to be often pictured as having yellow speckles, but as far as I can determine through a brief internet search, real robin eggs are uniformly blue. When the question is asked in places like ask.com and wiki.answers, blue speckled eggs are consistently identified as robin, whereas websites devoted to bird identification or bird watching refer to robin eggs as simply blue. No speckles mentioned on any of them I looked at. Some pictures seem to show some black speckling, but I suspect that's...ahem...other matter deposited on the eggs as they're laid. Weird the things you find out when you weren't thinking about it.