Category Archives: Nails of the Day

Day 4: Green Nails (31dc2014)

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I just recently got NYC – High Line Green, this really pretty “ugly green” color, so I really wanted to use it for Day 4.  Here it is before I started adding stuff to it:

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At first I thought I might go with a frog design, but I had already done cutesy ladybugs and bees, so I figured I should get off of the cute animal train before.  I opted for camo!

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Now, in real life, I don’t really like any activities that require the wearing of camouflage, but I really liked the idea of a camo print that was glammed up with a little pink and gold. This design was super easy, too!  It requires very little skill and no tools.  I just used the brush in the bottle to dab on little patches of color until I was happy with the design.  Then I used a nice thick quick-dry top coat to smooth it all out. 

Check out my instagram @polishmesnazzy.com for more pics of the 31 day challenge all month!  See you tomorrow with some blue nails!

 

Day 3: Yellow Nails (31dc2014)

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Yellow nails.  Meh.  I love yellow in general.  Is there a happier color?  I submit that there is not, but yellow anywhere next to my paleness, even at my tannest, is just never good.  After wading through lots of great suggestions on my facebook page, I opted for bumblebee nails.  Here’s what I ended up with:

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Sigh.  I just don’t love them, and I feel like they aren’t very original at all.  I mean, the bee look pretty much just like the ladybugs I did on Day 1, only not as cute.  I guess they’re not terrible, but I’m just not feeling them.  Tomorrow is another day and another challenge, though.

Day 2: Orange Nails (31dc2014)

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Today is orange nails day.  In regular life, I rarely paint my nails orange because I think it just looks bad with my light skin.  I was suckered into buying Orly – Tropical Pop a few weeks ago, though, because it’s just such a pretty, fun shade of orange. Kind of a light neon orange.  That’s the color I used for my base, with a traffic cone orange for the dots and the orange slices.

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I’ve been loving these nails more and more as the day goes on and I’m definitely sad that I have to take them off to get ready for tomorrow…  And I was sad yesterday when I had to take my ladybugs off… I guess I’m going to be sad every day for the next 29 days, unless one of these days is a real nail art fail.  Actually, I’m pretty sure the day I have to do water marble is going to be a major fail.  That’s not until Day 20, so I guess I have 18 more days until I really have to worry about being humiliated online in front of all the other nail bloggers.

One of the most fun things for the past 2 days has been checking out everybody’s nails on instagram.  Seriously, check out all of the awesome nails from people undertaking the 31 Day Challenge on instagram with #31dc2014.  See you tomorrow with some yellow nails!

Day 1: Red Nails (31dc2014)

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It’s been a crazy day (our refrigerator died and my whole family came over for a picnic) but it’s still technically Sept 1, so I’m not late yet!\.  Here are my nails for Day 1: Red Nails

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I was pretty happy with how these turned out!  Okay, it’s late and I’m off to bed!  Come check out all of the red nails on instagram at #31dc2014

Tip Top Nails Competition

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I learned from Wonderful Wolf, a fellow nail blogger that Tip Top Nails, a South African nail polish company is hosting a nail art competition on their facebook page.  Here are the rules:

1.  You can only use 3 colors and they need to be chosen by a male in your life.

2. Your focus needs to be on an accent nail.

3.  No acrylic paint or stamping.  This is supposed to show off your freehand skills.

4.  It’s also a photo contest, so your picture needs to somehow reflect your inspiration for your nail art.

This just sounded fun to me.  When I told my hubby Mike about it, he did some sort of evil laugh and said something about how he had all the power.  He chose a hot pink, bright blue and white.

Then I hunted around the house for some inspiration and I found some cute cupcake scrapbook paper that seemed to have potential.  Here’s the look I ended up with:

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I haven’t officially submitted my entry yet.  I think I might submit the picture with the close-up of 3 fingers since that shows the detail on the accent nail the best, but I’m not sure yet.

Anyway, you have until the end of August to enter this contest if you’re interested!   Check out Tip Top Nails South Africa’s facebook page for all of the details.   Let me know what you think and if you are going to enter!

 

Jelly Sandwich Time!

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Jelly sandwiches are not really a new thing in the nail polish world, but I run into enough people who give me a blank stare when I use the term that I thought it warranted a post.  A jelly sandwich is a layer of glitter that is sandwiched between a few layer of a jelly polish. 

What is a jelly polish, you ask?  Thank you for asking.  A jelly polish is a sheer, colored polish that generally looks like a Jolly Rancher when it dries on your nail – colored, but still see-through and really shiny.  The appearance of wet jelly polish always reminds me of the paint you used to paint those plastic faux stained glass sun-catcher things as a kid.  Do you know what I’m talking about? 

Sometimes polish brands will release a collection of jellies, but I think most lines of polish have a few jellies in the mix already.  Sometimes you can tell a polish is a jelly just by looking at it in the bottle, but the best way to tell is to open up the bottle and look at the polish on the brush and around the neck of the bottle.  If you can see through it easily, you’ve got a jelly.  If you can just sort of see through it, you may have a “crelly” on your hands.

A crelly is somewhere between a cream polish and a jelly.  (I feel like it’s a dumb word, and I avoid using it if possible, but really, there’s no other word to describe polishes like this.)  Have you seen those glitter polishes that are in a light colored, milky sort of base?  That’s  a crelly base.  Crellies work well for jelly sandwiches too. 

Here is the first jelly sandwich I ever attempted:

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Eh, it turned out okay.  I didn’t love it.  This was with a sheer nude polish from Avon called Barely There that I’ve had forever.  I would call this one a crelly.  The glitter polish I used is Fantasm from Valley Girl Lacquer.   (Valley Girl Lacquer is an indie polish company.  Check out their etsy shop.  They have some awesome glitter polishes!)

Just for reference, here’s what Fantasm looks like over black:

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you can definitely see how when you sandwich the glitter between the layers of “jelly” how it mutes the glitter effect. 

Here’s another jelly sandwich that I did using Fantasm and a purple limited edition polish called Deception from Wet n Wild.  I love this purple, and I’m sorry you can’t get it anymore. 

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I LOVED this manicure! Deception is so sheer that I think I used 2-3 coats of polish under the layer of glitter and then another 2-3 coats over the glitter, but gosh it was beautiful!  The way the glitter reflected light through the polish made my heart so happy. 

Here’s one final jelly sandwich:

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This is using Wet n Wild Megalast Bubblegum Pop and China Glaze Glitter Up.  (This Wet n Wild color is exclusive to Dollar General / Family Dollar as far as I know.)  This one I medium liked.  This pink is really fun but really… pink.

What are your thoughts about jelly sandwiches?  What are your favorite jelly polishes? 

Cow Toes!

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I’ve been painting “cow toes” forever.  Not painting the toes on actual cows, (Do they even have toes?) painting cow print on my own toenails.  By “forever” I mean close to 20 years.  Back in olden times – the ’90s – I was a camp counselor during the summers. I definitely remember sporting cow-print toes a lot back then and also painting cow-print on my fellow female counselors’ toes. 

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This pattern is so easy that it doesn’t even really warrant a full tutorial.  You just paint your nails white, and then using either a dotting tool, tooth pick or just the brush that comes in the polish, make irregular black splotches on the nails.  Really, it’s that easy. 

If you want to paint a little cow face on your big toes like I did here, just start with a white nail then add a pink semicircle for the nose.  Add two black dots for nostrils and two black dots for eyes.  If you have a little brush and you want your cow to look a little more feminine, add eyelashes.  Then fill the space around the face with a few black splotches.  Here’s a fuzzy closeup of one of my big toes.  I know, toes are gross.

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And finally, here are my cow toes hanging out the window while going for a ride in the country.  It seemed appropriate.

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Seriously, this design is super easy and always get tons of positive comments from people.  Give ’em a try while we can still wear sandals!

 

Plaid Watermelon Nails

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I’m not gotta lie; these took a long time.  While I did these nails plus my toes (which you’ll see on Wednesday), I watched almost the entire Blackfish documentary plus two episodes of Seinfeld.  (I needed to watch something a little lighter after Blackfish.) But aren’t they seriously cute?

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The first think I need to do is give Jaunty Juli credit for the design.  Her original version of this design is on her YouTube channel.  You should check her out.  She’s really good!

For this look, the only polish I used besides my base and top coat was a white. The rest of the color is actually acrylic craft paint.  Craft paint is easier to work with than polish, it washes off with water, and it’s really cheap, like $.65 per bottle.  Since they are water soluble, I just us a plate from my kitchen as a little pallet.  Works like a charm.  Just make sure you apply a top coat so you don’t wash your design off when you wash your hands.  That would be tragic.

Here’s how I did them….

First I started with 2 coats of white polish:

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Then I added thick crosses on each nail using light blue paint.  (I actually took some blue I had on hand and mixed it with a little white paint to get the color that I wanted.)  As you can see, I changed the placement of the lines on each nail just to sort of mix it up.  You don’t nee to paint them the whole way to your cuticle since we are going to be adding the watermelons later.

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I added some thin blue lines going vertically and horizontally wherever I had room.

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I then took a darker blue paint and my littlest brush and darkened the spots where the lines intersect.  This is what really makes the plaid look like plaid.

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I added a few neon yellow stripes with paint where I could fit them in.  In retrospect, I should have left a little more room for the yellow lines, but it’s all good. The yellow paint was pretty sheer, so it interacted nicely where it overlapped the blue to make a greenish shade.

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Next I started to add the red paint over my half moon area on my thumb, but I quickly realized the my neon red paint was not going to cover the blue polish near my cuticles.  I decided I needed to take white paint and cover up the blue paint where I wanted to paint the watermelons.  (I’m not showing  you my thumb, because it looked pretty messed up at this point.)

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Then I took my red paint and filled in most of the half moon area, leaving a little room for the rind.

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then I added a thin neon green stripe next to the red.

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Then I added a little black and green together to make a darker green and added a final thin stripe to make the rind.

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Can you tell I was using my palm to wipe my brush some at this point?  Anyway, with my littlest brush, I added in some black seeds and then applied a top coat.

Here’s what they looked like the next day in natural light where you can see the neon-ness a little better:

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Please let me know if you try these!  I’d love to see your recreations on facebook or instagram!  Oh, and check out Jaunty Juli on YouTube or instagram, too!

 

Mannequin Hands… And Then I Added Stuff.

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I while back, I went on a quest to find my perfect “mannequin hands” polish.  By that I mean a polish that was as close to a perfect match to my skin as I could find.  I had heard that Deborah Lippmann had a polish called Naked that was a good match for a lot of people who are fair like me, so I checked it out at Sephora.  Yep, it’s a great nude shade that was a really close match to my skin, but you know what?  Deborah Lippmann polishes cost $20 and I absolutely refuse to spend $20 on a single polish.  Nope, I’m never going to do it.  I can’t imagine any possible scenario in which I would spend $20 on a single polish.  If I’m spending $20 on polish, you’d better believe that I’m going to be getting like, 10 bottles for that price.  Okay, let me get back on track…

So, this one time I was at Kmart and I spotted a color that I had never noticed before from NCY from the In A New York Minute line called Fashion Safari.  I did that thing that you’re not supposed to do (even though everyone does it) and opened up the bottle in the store.  I had polish on my nails already, so I just brushed a tiny bit of the polish onto the back of my hand and it blended right in!  best of all, it cost under $2!  I feel bad for the suckers who buy Deborah Lippmann Naked when there’s NYC Fashion Safari in the world.  Anyway, here it is with a matte top coat:

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Fun, right?  My hand really almost looks like a mannequin’s, right?  By the way, this is the color I used for the sand colored nails in my Beach Inspired Nail Art. In that tutorial, I actually painted my sister’s nails and her skin is definitely a shade or two darker than mine.  It’s a little hard to tell in the picture, but in person, you could definitely see that Fashion Safari was lighter than my sister’s skin.  I also used it in my Real Seashell Nails with a pearly color shifting polish over top.

Well, my mannequin hands fascinated me for about 24 hours, and then I decided that I needed to add something to them.  I opted for some of the chunky glitter that is Funky Fingers Pep Rally and I ended up with this look:

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I didn’t actually just brush the glitter onto my nails.  I used a little dotting tool to pick the individual pieces of glitter off the brush and placed them where I wanted them.  It’s a little time consuming, but not very hard.  I also opted to top them with Sech Vite, since it’s thick enough to smooth out this really chunky glitter. 

That’s it for today!  As always, thank you for liking, following, and sharing!  Come find me on instagram and facebook!

Splotchy Neon Nails

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Splotchy Neon Nails is what I’m calling these, because I can’t think of a better name, although I’m sure there is one:

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Again, these are my sister’s nails.  She felt she needed something cute and beach-appropriate for her trip to Cancun.  Here’s how we got this look…

First, I started with two coats of white polish.  Specifically, I used Sinful Colors – Snow Me White.  Then I put tape around the nails to make clean up easier at the end. 

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I’m hoping you can see the tape that is over the top of the nail, and around the finger at the base of the cuticle. 

I used these four polishes for the colored part:

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L-R: Nina – Blue Blaze, Fresh Paint – Guava, Funky Fingers – Glow Stick, Sinful Colors – Dream On. 

From here on out, the technique was pretty much exactly the same as it was for the white polish for my Beach Inspired Nail Art.  (Check it out for a more detailed description of this technique).  Basically, I took a disposable plastic container, filled it with room-temperature filtered water, dropped nail polish on the surface of the water, and sprayed it with some alcohol-based body spray to get the polish to break up.  Then I had my sister dunk her fingers in the water, which allowed the polish that’s floating on the surface to adhere to her nails.  While her fingers were still in the water, I used a Q-tip to pull the remaining polish off the surface of the water.  It’s hard to do more than about 2 fingers at a time, so you will need to repeat this process quite a few times.  There is a bit of a learning curve, but it’s really not too hard, just a little time-consuming.

We did Guava on the index finger, pinky, and thumb, and Glow Stick on the other two fingers. 

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Then we repeated the steps with Blue Blaze over the Guava nails, and Dream On over the Glow Stick nails.

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Then, one more time we did Guava on the index finger, pinky, and thumb, and Glow Stick on the other two fingers, just to make sure that those lighter colors were showing up well enough on the nail. 

At this point, it was a little hard to appreciate the designs on her nails since there was so much polish all over her fingers.  My sister was an enthusiastic finger dunker so she had polish pretty far up her fingers. 

From here we took off the tape and topped the nails with Seche Vite, a quick dry top coat.  Then using a Q-tip dipped in acetone as well as a little brush dipped in acetone, I cleaned up all of the excess polish.  

Here’s our end result!

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Fun and cute, right?  If you give this look a try, I’d love to see your recreations on either facebook or instagram.  Just make sure you tag Polish Me Snazzy or use the hashtag #polishmesnazzy so that I can see it.  Thanks for reading!