Bayberry in November

The last of my back-dated manicures, I finally went back to fall colors for one last hurrah. Having found a variety of gorgeous plants and fallen leaves along with some holly springs, I made this pretty little thing for my desk at work:



This picture was taken with my phone, so the colors weren't captured nearly as vibrant as they were in real life. The reds and purples came out nicely, but the yellow and orange were much more vivid and striking than this picture shows. The next day I created this on my nails to go with it!

I used quite a few different polishes for this one! On a base of NYC Fashion Safari, I used Vernis Milk Chocolate and Cappucino to draw some branches, and I added random swipes of Barielle Myrza's Meadow for some green-tinted sparkly goodness. I then used a dotting tool to create leaves with alllll of the following polishes...

(listed in primarily color-spectrum order)

Sinful Colors Beau Brique

Sinful Colors Timbleberry

Wet N Wild The Clock Strikes Orange

Wet N Wild Sunny Side Up

Sally Girl Banana

Sinful Colors Let's Meet

Sinful Colors Innocent

Sinful Colors Happy Ending

That's a lot of polishes, but I always have fun with a dotting tool and I really think the end result was gorgeous.

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.

Autumn Fallen Leaves

I'm out of town at a work conference, but I managed to take a few minutes to edit these pictures before I left and upload them so I could work on the blog post whenever I felt like taking a short break from the conference. I'm glad I did, too, because I'm really proud of this mani and I'm happy to be able to share it now rather than having to wait until next week.

The base color is one I just picked up, that I didn't realize was a matte until I used it (though I topcoated it on this manicure, since that was how I expected it to look and didn't plan for a matte) - Sinful Colors Leather Loose. I really love rich brown polishes - I always think my favorite color is green, but my nail polish collection says differently, since brown is by far the most common color - and this one is no different. It has a similar gold shimmer to China Glaze Midtown Magic, though the base brown isn't as dark. MM frequently gets mistaken for black when I use it as a base color, but there is no mistaking Leather Loose as anything but a rich, thick brown, with a deep reddish gold shimmer.

As a matte, it dried to an interesting chalky brown color. It doesn't really remind me of leather in anything but the texture, but I look forward to experimenting with it in the future. But the matte startled me, and wasn't what I had in mind when I started this manicure, but with topcoat the polish looked exactly like I expected it to out of the bottle. Absolutely beautiful.

I used a lot of different polishes on these leaves, and I may have forgotten one because I started putting them back on the shelf before I realized I hadn't written them all down yet. I started out drawing a variety of leaf shapes with Sinful Colors Snow Me White, and then for the various shades of red, yellow, and orange, I know that I used (in no particular order) Primary Beauty Neon Orange, Sinful Colors Courtney Orange, Let's Talk, and Beau Brique, and China Glaze Cranberry Splash and Salsa. Sinful Colors Coffee was used for the brown stems and veins.

I didn't have any particular type of leaf in mind. In fact, I pulled up a diagram on the internet with a dozen different leaf shapes on it (google search "leaf shapes" gives you plenty to choose from!) and just tried to make a variety of them. I didn't manage to do teeth-edged leaves very well, though I tried a few times, but I was happy enough with the end result.

I also wanted a variety of leaf colors, but I wanted the overall result to be predominantly red, because I had already chosen my wardrobe for the conference, and while my outfit bases were white, black, and grey, I used red uniformly for the color splashes so I could mix and match my pieces and therefore pack less for the trip without worrying about anything clashing. So, mostly red, but very Autumn, leaves on my nails. :) I think this is my second-best manicure to date (second, of course, to the violet flowers I did from the BCTC tutorial!)