Aztec Manicure

  Finalmente! Más uñas pintadas!

  Ok, we're excited to be back after so much blog silence.  Now, I was calling this my tribal manicure, but in an effort to be less casually racist*, I am changing its name to Aztec manicure because I think it looks a lot like traditional Aztec textiles in color and pattern.  I was inspired by a Southwestern look done by the inimitable Pierre, I just decided to top him and do a whole damn manicure in this style.  I'm really pleased with how these turned out!
 


 In case you are wondering, yes, this did take me for-fucking-ever.  I spread this one out over three days, doing three or four nails per day.  Each session was probably a couple hours long.  So we're gonna clock this mani in at 6 hours of work.  (Wow!  Writing that out makes it sound infinitely more insane!)

  If you look closely, you can tell that each nail has a base color, which shows up in most (if not all) of the stripes.  In retrospect, I think I would not start with a base color, because in the event that you don't want that color in every stripe, you end up doing a lot of unnecessary layering, which we all know leads to manicure doom.  Less is more.
  

Yowza! What a fucking mess!

  You might also notice how messy these nails are around the edges...allow me to explain. 

  I find that doing decorative manicures by hand can get pretty messy, especially when you want a nice, clean edge that's flush with the edge of your nail.  No gaps, please!  Sometimes if I know I'm going to get really messy, like with a moon manicure, I will use scotch tape to mask off the "danger zone" of my nail.  Otherwise I just go ahead and paint it right off the nail and onto the skin, like I'm sure everyone does.  My difference is that I don't go back and clean up with a cotton swab and some remover - what a stupid fucking waste of time that is!  Whenever I make the mistake to do this, I end up scrubbing off part of my design!


  Pro-tip of the day is this: Do your manicure at the end of your day.  Let it dry, sleep in it, and your morning shower will soften all those excess bits of polish on your hand and slough them right off without nary a scratch or stain! I took these photos as soon as I finished, in order to get the best preserved shot of the design as I could and well, I paid for it in cleanliness.



*I highly recommend following this link if you have the time to read an approx. two-page paper.  It explains things a lot more eloquently than I dare attempt to summarize.

THIS IS AMERICA!!

We take dress-up themes very seriously.

  If you know me at all, you know I have precious little civic pride, but that isn't going to stop me from enjoying a thematic dress-up opportunity or the chance to paint my nails the appropriate holiday theme!  Hence, AMERICA! The Manicure was born.  I really wanted to paint a few little flags, unfortunately the US flag looks like about a hundred other flags in the world (have you seen Liberia's flag?  Seriously it looks exactly like what I'd paint a "simplified" US flag as) and I really didn't want to have some Texas-ass-lookin' flag, either, so I had to get crafty.
  I recently ordered some nail striping tape as part of an Amazon nail-accoutrements binge.  They came as a set of ten colors for only a couple bucks, but the tape is so so thin (only about 1/10 cm) that it's really kind of hard to work with.  I found that it was better to firmly adhere the tape to my nails before trimming the edges to length.
  I generally prefer to use the tape just as masking, because tape on nails never really stays put, no matter how many layers of top-coat you apply.  But I had to make an exception because I just didn't want to get into the nightmare of masking off all the stripes of the flag.  So, there's a bit of both going on here, though the flags were made much easier with the help of super-skinny white tape!

  As per usual, not a great picture but you get the idea.  It's always an epic battle to balance sharpness with accurate color on my stupid little digital camera, but I do try.  This red is a newsie from Revlon (my love!) called Fearless, it's a totally gorge slightly orangey-red, and it's just perfect.  It's almost a poppy red, great for the summer.  I currently have it on my toes and it's giving me another reason to just stare at my feet when I walk!

Deep Thoughts

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