Acutely Angled Rainbows

This one is a personal nail fail, though it came out looking kind of cute. It was a fail because it wasn't the way I wanted it to look when I designed it in my head. This is an example of why I tell people that I'm not creative. I'm good at implementation, not design, which is why so many of my best manicures are copied from other people's creations.

I started with a base of Sinful Colors Cinderella, and then I just drew triangles in the following rainbow of colors: Sinful Shine Devious, Wet N Wild The Clock Strikes Orange, China Glaze Solar Power, OPI Jade is the New Black, Sinful Shine Break Away, and Wet N Wild Who is Ultra Violet? I started with a different color on each nail, so that they layered differently; for example, on some nails the last triangles added were red, while on another nail the top layer of triangles is orange, or yellow.

I think I might try this one again at some point, but instead of doing two triangles of each color, only do one. I think it just came out too busy. And I didn't get the triangle lines as crisp and precise as I would have liked. Ah, well, no one is perfect, and definitely not me!

Black White and Red All Over

I have nothing interesting to say about the planning of this manicure, so I thought I'd start with the picture first this time. When I sat down to do my nails, I had nothing in mind, though I did feel like using red, and I wanted something with good contrast. So I scanned through my pinterest page for inspiration, and came across this lovely by Raggio di Luna:

I can never match her crisp, tiny lines and fine detail, but I do my best and I'm pretty happy with my own results, as they're some of my personal best work to date.

The base polish is Sinful Colors Beau Brique, and the white and black on tap today were Sinful Shine Wisp and Dark Room. I do need to be more careful when painting the base color when I'm using red, as it's impossible to clean up without the cuticles looking red anyway, and I'm annoyed that while the top coat did not cause streaks across my nail art, the red still bled through the white. Next time maybe I'll do a few more layers of the white before topcoating it. I so seldom use red as a base color, since I'm not particularly fond of it, that I forget these tricks!

Dippity Dotty Doo

I needed a green fix! OPI Jade is the New Black and OPI Live and Let Die were the base colors for this manicure, and Sinful Shine Wisp is my current go-to white polish. There's not much more to say about this manicure - I used a larger dotting tool to make white dots, filled in the spaces with smaller white dots, then went back over with the smaller dotting tool in the base color to dot on top of the large white ones. The most frequent comment on this mani was, "Bubbles!"

 

 

Don't You Make My Brown Eyes Blue...

Okay, I don't have brown OR blue eyes, but I was so sick and tired of winter colors that I really wanted a nice, rich brown on my nails. However, the day I did this manicure the snow was sooo beautiful and delicate that I just really wanted to do snowflakes. So what you get is the first few snowflakes falling on rich winter soil!

I started with a base of Sinful Colors Coffee, and then layered Max Factor Fantasy Fire over it. I put two stripes of China Glaze I Herd That on each nail, and then I used Sinful Shine Wisp and my tiniest detail brush to draw snowflakes as delicately as I could manage. I even looked up the various crystal structures that snow can come in before drawing them! I also traced a hint of China Glaze I'm Not Lion along some lines of the snowflakes to make them sparkle and come alive. However, all that glitter and shine made it really difficult for the camera to focus, and quite a few of my pictures came out blurry. Here's one of the out-of-focus pictures to show off the glorious color of all the glitters, though!

I tried twice to draw snowflakes on my right hand, and they came out horrifically blobby so I gave up and just left them with the Coffee, Fantasy Fire, and I Herd That stripes, but I have a hard enough time getting pictures of my right hand to focus, as my left hand is shakier holding the camera. With this manicure, I failed entirely to get even a single decent picture of my dominant hand. But here's a few more pictures of the pretty half!

Floral Bijou

According to dictionary.com, "bijou" means either a jewel or something small, delicate, and exquisitely wrought. Regrettably, I don't think this manicure lives up to the base color's name, but it was kind of fun and playful. This is another one of the manicures that I did before the holiday manis (and clearly before my more than 50% of my nails broke off at the quick!) but it got lost in my list of entries and never got posted.

The base color is, as I said, Zoya Bijou. The flowers were done with NYC Purple Pizzazz Frost and all the white details were done with Milani White on White.

I had forgotten just how long my nails had gotten before they all broke! Look at those thumbnails, wow! I'm still growing them back out now. I only have one that broke again and is still shorter than the end of my finger, but the rest are getting back there.

Winter Whimsies

I did this manicure about a week after Christmas, just before coming back to work after the winter break. It wasn't snowing when I painted these, though it started later that day, and I didn't realize until I woke up the next morning that suddenly what had been just pretty swirls and dots had turned into blowing wind and snow!

I started with two coats of Broadway O! Jessica and used Milani Whitest White to sponge on a gradient from the tips. I then mixed a bit of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure I Lilac You with some Milani Whitest White on my palette and used the pale lavender to draw the swirls and dots. My inspiration was the gorgeous manicure by Bottle of Happiness which can be found here.

As usual, since I'm right-handed, my right hand is never as crisp or precise as my left, but I still think it came out pretty nicely for this manicure!

Follow the...Pink...Brick Road?

This was the first manicure I did after all of the winter Yule/Christmas celebrations. I was a little tired of reds and greens (though I really was loathe to take those beautiful poinsettias off until they started chipping!) and I got a few polishes for Christmas as stocking stuffers (some I bought for myself, and some my BFF put in there to surprise me) so of course I have to use them! Untrieds do not stay that way for long at my desk.

V gave me my first Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure polish, in I Lilac You, and that's the base of this manicure. Funny enough, I also have a Rimmel London polish by the same name! I know it's touted as not needing any base coat or top coat, but I just can't bring myself to go there, so base coat definitely went on under this. The other two polishes she snuck in my stocking were Sinful Colors Bali Mist and Pinky Glitter. I added my own stocking stuffer of Broadway O! Jessica and used Sinful Shine Dark Room for the brick outlines.

Bali Mist is sheer enough that the bricks that look purple are a thin coat of Bali Mist over O! Jessica. I also put Pinky Glitter over some O! Jessica bricks and some Bali Mist bricks, giving me a total of five "colors" for the bricks.

As always, I like to show pictures of my right hand as well, to show that yes, it does look a bit worse than my left hand, but with practice, you can get decent looking nail art on your dominant hand, too! You just have to go a fair bit slower on that hand...not that I always practice what I preach, of course. :P

I had to add a blurry picture to show how gorgeous the Pinky Glitter looks over the O! Jessica! Isn't that gorgeous?

Flowers on a Million Dollar Mermaid

I have a few manicures that I did back before Christmas that never got posted for some reason, so you get filler posts for now. One of my polish exchange group sent me a Deborah Lippmann polish. I can't fathom spending that kind of money for a polish unless it was on someone's really high wish list, but I'm certainly not ungrateful! The reason I joined the exchange group was to get polishes that I wouldn't buy for myself, so I had a full range of colors in my palette whenever I wanted to create something new, and Million Dollar Mermaid definitely qualifies!

If I remember correctly, this is just two coats of MDM. I remember expecting it to be sheer and being surprised at how thoroughly it covered. As should be expected from a high dollar polish, the glitter spread completely evenly and no moving it around was required for full coverage. I used Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau and Primark Beauty Neon Blue for the flowers, along with one of my several different white polishes. For some reason, I didn't note down which white I used, so I can't tell you this long after the fact. ::sheepish grin::