Tired of Fall Colors!

Long time, no post. I haven't posted for nearly a month, but rest assured, I have been doing my nails and taking pictures. And now I'm getting around to posting them. :) First, a sad, sad thing happened. The last manicure I posted was this one:

And about four days after I painted that manicure, FOUR of my nails broke off at the quick. The next day, another two joined them. I of course filed down the remaining four to very short, but at some point over the next week, they also broke off as short as they would go.

The reason? I at first thought it was because I had tried a completely different nail shape. I've always filed my nails squoval - square, with rounded corners - but since it was always the corner edges that broke off that necessitated filing down length to make the nails square again, I decided to see what actual oval looked like on my hands. It's pretty, I think, but it did lose a lot of structural strength. My nails are very, very bendy, and making them oval seemed to make them more likely to bend farther down.

The ladies at PolishAholics Anonymous, though, suspected that the cause was most likely the fact that I haven't run out of my strengthening base coat in too long. As I said, I have very, very flexible bendy nails that also peel. I tried several different treatments when I started doing nail art to try and get them to go past the end of my fingers, but until I discovered Haken Nail Magic, nothing worked. After that, they got niiiice and long. (The above picture is a little short of their longest length, actually.) But the store I bought it from frequently ran out, so I never went more then 3 months or so using it and then I'd have to use something else for a while until I got another bottle. Welllllll the last time I bought four bottles at once via mail order. I've gone through nearly two bottles and BOOM, broken nails. I went and bought a simple quick-dry base coat, and from now on I'll be one month on, one month off with my Nail Magic, and when they're long again, I'll try the oval again, and see if they survive next time!

On to the rest of the manicure post...As the subject says, I was sick and tired of fall color manicures when I did this one, and more than a little grumpy at my stubbins. I used a base of Sinful Colors Tokyo Pearl, with Sinful Colors Super Star in random swirly designs, with a few lines of Pure Ice Splash for highlights.