Tag Archives: nail art

Nails of the Day

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So, here are my nails of the day… My NOTD, as they say. 

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Whoa, I just learned how to add a boarder to my pictures.  I’m pretty stoked about that.

I was pretty happy to find this L.A. Colors Flash Pop in my local Dollar General / Family Dollar.  I’ve never seen these sets anywhere else, so my guess is that they may be exclusive to those stores.  It’s weird that there are polishes that are exclusive to Dollar General / Family Dollar, but there totally are.  More about that at a later time.

They thing that prompted me to buy this was the neon pink glitter.  Outside of the indie polish scene, neon glitter is pretty darn hard to find.  At $2.50, I couldn’t pass it up.

The pink glitter is mixed with some shredded black and silver glitter along with some silver micro glitter and tiny silver bar glitter.  The pink glitters are pretty thin transparent, so unfortunately, I don’t think they would show up well over a dark color, but I’ll have to test that out later to be sure.  Since the glitters are thin, they do lay nice and flat on the nail. The clear base is a bit gunky, so you sort of have to have a little patience to get it to apply how you want it, but it all smoothed out nicely after applying my Seche Vite top coat. 

I haven’t tried the purple shade that came on the other end, so I can’t give my 2 cents about that polish.  (It looks sort of blue in the picture, but it really is dark purple.)

This particular manicure is part of an experiment to compare 2 different base coats, so you’ll see these nails again later after the results are in. 

 

 

My Disney Nails

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I’m a Disney fan.  I don’t consider myself to be an over-the-top crazy Disney lover, but I do have an affinity for the Mouse and I enjoy a trip to one of his parks every 5 years or so.

Earlier this year, my hubby and I enjoyed a week of magic down in Walt Disney World.  Leading up to, and during that trip, I made sure that I was always sporting nails that would be Mouse approved.  I thought I’d share those looks with you!

*I do want to put out a little disclaimer that I didn’t come up with these designs 100% on my own, but a number of months have passed, so I’m not exactly sure where I got some of these ideas. There are are some really creative nail artists out there, and I don’t want to get into a beef with anyone for stealing a design.  If one of these designs was originally yours, feel free to contact me so that I can give you proper credit.

Anyway, here are some of my Disney nail recreations:

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The base was a light neon pink.  I loved these nails!  Please forgive the sloppiness around the cuticles in this pic.  My technique has improved since then!

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These aren’t actually my nails, but nails I did on a friend.

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These were pretty tricky to do, but I loved them!  These  were my nails for the first half of our trip.

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These were the toes I sported for our trip.  Yes, those little faces took forever to get right!

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This is the look I sported for the second half of our trip.   These were super simple, and I got tons of compliments on them while we were in the parks!  Note the refillable Disney mug in the background.

Just looking at these pictures reminds me of our trip and gives me the warm Disney fuzzies.  Sporting special nails for a particular event (or vacation in this instance) really does add a little something extra.  Don’t be afraid to nails that are bold and bright, if the occasion is right!

 

 

 

 

Four Days of Wear

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I’m getting ready to take my current polish off to do some swatches for you, but I thought I should show you something first. Here are my nails after 4 days of wear, one of which involved 2+ hours of yard work:

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You can see a little bit of nail growth at the cuticle, and the tiniest bit of wear on the tip of my first finger, but that’s it.  (In retrospect, I probably should have taken a picture of my right hand, since that’s my dominant hand, but really, the wear is about the same.)

Anyway, my point is that this is why you should use a base and a top coat.  My polish would chip in a day if I didn’t.  For this particular manicure, I used Revlon Quick Dry Base Coat, 2 coats of NYC In a New York Minute Amazon green, and Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat.  In the near future, I am planing to put a few base coats and top coats up against each other in an attempt to find out which ones really are the best, but so far I’ve never been disappointed by the Revlon base coat/Seche Vite top coat combination.

I’m off to write a much more substantial post now on how to make your neon polish look as awesome as possible.  Until next time, happy polishing!

 

And So It Begins…

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Hi Friends! Welcome to my blog!

I paint my nails a lot.  I’ve always enjoyed nail art and nail polish.  I think I bought my first nail art book when I was in high school.  (Yes, the internet was only a baby back then, so people would by books made out of paper when they wanted to learn stuff.)  I actually used to use pieces of uncooked spaghetti as dotting tools back then.

Since then, I’ve come a long way, and that’s what I hope to share with those of you who are interested!  I’ve had some great opportunities to talk about nails with a lot of you on a one-on-one basis, but I think this will be a much better format to share some of the stuff that I’ve figured out over the years.

I guess it would be sort of a crime to end my first post without at least giving some sort of nail-related tip…  Don’t shake your polish right before you are going to use it.  Roll it around in your hands like they do in the salon.  If you shake it, you’ll make little air bubbles in the polish like this:

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Do you see that?  I was in a hurry last night and I just shook the heck out of that bottle.  I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway, and now I’m paying for it.

Well, I think that’s about all I’ve got to say for now, but I’ll be back!