Double Nail Extravaganza!

  Oh my god!  My nail is finally healed and I've been varnishing with a vengeance, I tell you!  Remember back here when I hurt my stupid thumb?  Well I swear this nail has been growing extra-fast to cover the exposed under-thumb territory.  Anyhoo, aside from a little bit of weird, sad discoloration, it's back in business!

  Let's kick off today's double header with the mutha'fuckin NEON YELLOW manicure that I went on a drugstore odyssey in order to achieve.  Would you believe I went to three stores before I found the damn stuff?  And naturally I went for the one everyone had mentioned on teh blogz, which was, sadly, Neon Melon  by Sinful Colors, which sucks.  It's awful, streaky, gloppy stuff, and I left it on my hands for barely half a day.  The next day I went to Sally's Beauty Supply like a good girl and bought some China Glaze Celtic Sun which, true to form, goes on fabulously - smooth thin layers, just the way I like 'em.   This level of opacity took three coats.

Just ignore my janky thumb on the right, there.  It's just the aftermath of the thumb-trauma - don't judge me.

  Ahh, and viola!  What light from yonder fingertip breaks?  It is the east, and Neon Yellow is the sun.  Call me a trend whore all you want, but god damnit, I love me some neon yellow right now!  It just looks so good!  And in a June marked by grey skies and wet shoes, it's really cheering me up.

  I can't resist getting all artsy on my nails, so these lovelies are accented with a couple of blues - an unremarkable medium-blue I bought from Urban Outfitters that barely deserves a mention, and Revlon Royal, which is a glorious and delightful polish.  I also used another unimpressive UO polish, a grey that's a nice color, but a real shit polish, if you ask me.  I covered it with Sally Hansen Gem Crush in Glitz Gal, which I will talk more about in a minute.  I even added a few blue heart-shaped gems, which, while a little blurry in the photos, actually turned out pretty cute and far less tacky than my maiden voyage into nail gems.

That slight touch of rainbow!  Ah!  It's beautiful!!

  Now, I find that neons don't tend to last very long before they start to show signs of the various tiny traumas of my day, and get all opaque and cracked.  So once the neon went the way of the buffalo, I decided to run with that grey glitter on grey nails that I'd done on just a few accents above, and do something kinda classy for a change. 




  Oh my god, I have to say, this Sally Hansen Gem Crush line of glitter topcoats is fucking awesome.  I'm totally back into glitter, especially if it's a nice dense glitter with varying sizes.  It's got to have varying sizes of glitter in there, and lots of it.  The grey is awesome because it has just a touch of iridescence, which is a nice subtle color effect on the muted-for-glitter-nails grey.   Doesn't this manicure just look so effing glamorous!?  I spent the whole week just admiring my nails everywhere I went!

50/50 Nails

  Wow, slacking this week, huh?  How about another quickie about nails?  We love those.

Photographed on an LP with a picture of a leather jacket, not actual leather.  Weird!

  I love to do a little half 'n' half mani when I can't decide between two colors.  I decided to go vertical since to me horizontal halfsies looks like a french mani that didn't know when to quit.  For this I used Revlon "Jaded," which I absolutely looove!  It's a super smooth opaque that's not too streaky.  I usually need three coats, two if I'm being heavy-handed.  It's just a really great pastel and I fucking love it.  Honestly I just love all my Revlon polishes.  For a drug-store find, they are really great, and they last a while, too.  The purple is some ridiculous stuff called Island Girl, which I  naturally bought in Maui.  It's called "Waikiki Dream" in case you ever find it.  I bought this on a day-drunk afternoon, so I don't remember how much it cost, but it was cheap.  Finally, a black stripe to divide the sides!  This added a little depth to the look, and covered up my sloppy seams.  Bonus!

Here's a way clearer picture with less accurate colors.  The pale green just gets so blanched by my camera's flash!

[Self-Promotional Blog Post Title Goes Here]

Oh look, here's me on It's My Darlin' from last winter!  I just remembered this on the bus this morning, so I thought I'd do a little personal pimping and share it here. 

It's a serious winter outfit, replete with wool coat and wide-brimmed hat, but the pièce de résistance is obviously that insane quilted polyester skirt I'm wearing.  I made it in high school out of a positively glorious queen-sized '70s quilt I found at a thrift store near my folks' place.  Honestly, I have about a yard and a half of this quilt left-over, which is currently adorning my ugliest armchair.  I swear every time I look at it I regret having unceremoniously chopped it to bits to make a few insane looking skirts.  But at least it got me some props, some eight years on, right?

Cribbed my glamor shot from It's My Darlin'.  Credit is due, natch.

Pebbles Flintstone Manicure

  It's been a slow week here in Blogland, and especially in Manicuria.  I can get a bit careless with my nails, since I am often working with my hands and using my nails as tools.  Just two weeks ago I was doing god-knows-what and clumsily brought my hand down with a mighty force on my coffee table.  Seriously I don't know why or even how exactly I did it - maybe my depth perception is off? - but I did, I smashed the hell out of that table with my thumbnail.  Unfortunately there was a casualty, as a long, deep shard of nail ripped off, bled a whole bunch, and then made a blood blister under the nail.  It hurt like a bitch.

  I didn't want to paint while I monitored the nail and prayed to the nail gods that the dang thing wouldn't fall all the way off.  Happily it doesn't seem like it's going to jump ship, so I went ahead and gave 'em a few coats and even glued some gems on there.  I just picked up my first nail gems, which I don't usually like because shit sticking off my nails bothers me a lot and I tend to just pick it off.  Besides, it makes your manicure more fragile and that is just not good for doing stuff with your hands.  There'll be more on that later, meanwhile I'm busy trying to figure out how to make nail rhinestones look like something other than super cheap n' tacky. 

 To tide you over, here's a little favorite I've been sitting on for a while.  For some reason I only have a right hand shot of these, and it seems I took it after a few days' wear, but oh well, you still get the idea.

Triangles. For. Days.

  I'm calling this my Pebbles Manicure because it just reminds me so much of the youngest Flintstone.  The base color is my beloved favorite, Savina "White Lavander," with some boring old Revlon black for the details.  I am definitely in a triangles phase right now, it's all I wanna paint.  Trying a few different styles here, and I'm feeling quite fond of the vertical zig-zag action on the pointer nail.  An idea to try for a full set, I think!  I'd say this look counts as party nails, too.

Yellow Triangle Moons: Variations on a Theme

  Despite every fiber of my being resisting, I'm going to blog in the name of consistency.  It's been a rough week.

  Anyway, when I'm feeling like an easy manicure, I usually do a simple duo-tone look.  I love, love, loooove half-moon manicures, so I've been having fun with variations of the moon manicure!  One of the easiest and most obvious variations is, of course, triangles!  (They're so hot right now!)

Neon Yellow Triangle "Moons"

More accurate representation of the colors.

  This particular color combo, StripeRite neon yellow over Revlon matte grey (I'm gonna have to check up on that one later, I cannot remember.  I think it was called "Cloud" or some such nonsense...)  This looks so, so much better in photos than in real life.  The yellow just doesn't pop from the grey unless it's got a direct light source.  SO, things to know if you want to try this color combo.  I'd recommend outlining the triangles in black, or doing a base coat of white before you apply the yellow.

You can see in the second photo how much the yellow sort of blends into the grey, and you completely lose the tips!  They just look like regular half-moons! They're just too close in hue, which I found surprising.  Ah, adventures in color theory!

Springtime Toes!

 
  Now I don't usually spend this much time on my toes, (it's just such an awkward position, ugh) but I was in a mood so I did my nails and my toes.  I just had too many ideas, and didn't have room in the nail theme for this '90s abstract-floral thing I wanted to try.  And since it's still technically Springtime and the weather is rainy as shit in Seattle, here's a lovely springtime toe jam!  I decided to do all the rest of the toes in different combos of the floral palette, since my toenails are so tiny that there's not much to paint and i had to keep it simple.

  The floral was really simple, I just did layers and layers of big irregular blobs and vague flower-shapes, and a few streaks of green.  Then I added a few yellow dots in the centers of the blobs, and viola!  Looks like flowers.  This is a good look to try for some party nails, since you probably don't want to attempt full floral on the first try, and you can use the other nails to practice your polka dots and stripes!