50 Shades of Grey

  Let me start off by saying I hate myself for that title, but I just couldn't think of any other puns on the color grey.  So, I'm sorry, but the awful title stays, because it's too perfect for a post all about how much I loooooove grey nail polish!!
  I love it because it's perfectly neutral without being all gothy and black, and it just looks soooo classy!  Besides, mattes have been really in this season and grey is just so hot right now!  I also love grey as a base when doing really any fun nail designs, because I find that it's easier to use than white polish, both in terms of number of coats needed and quality of polish,* but it's almost just as bright, so you can make your detail colors really pop.  (*Seriously, can we talk about white nail polish for a second?  Like, why is it always, no matter how much you spend on it, the thickest, goopiest crap of all time?  I mean it - my Wet 'n' Wild is equal in quality to my OPI.  They're both fucking horrid.  Sometimes I think we were better off back in the WhiteOut-as-nail-polish days of yore.  And streaky.  Always streaky, so you need at least two coats to make it even.  But it's so thick that it's way heavy at even just two coats, which makes it start chipping the moment it dries?  Ugh. Ugh. Ughhh.  Anyway...)

  Now that I've finished talking about how much I hate white nail polish, (not the way it looks! I love that part!) here's a look with white nail polish!  Super simple white half-moons.  I love a good monochromatic manicure, too, so bonus!  The white is OPI, the grey is Revlon Top Speed in Hazy.  Love this shade, it's one of my favorites.  White half-moons are typically done on nude nails, like a reverse French, but I love using a surprising shade for the main color.  It's playful while remaining totally chic.  Perfect.


  My current nail obsession is ombre glitter.  It's incredibly easy to do right and make it look like a pro job!  You want to use a glitter with a clear polish base - the great thing about clear bases is that any brush strokes and roughness is magically erased with a top coat - not so with colored gel bases.  And you are going to need a top-coat to gloss over the mountain of glitter if you try this look.

Sigh, stupid camera.  Top photo has most accurate color.

  It's a simple process: I did my longest layer first, letting the brush drip heavy at the base of my nail, and taper off to nothing by the time I got to the tip, actually stopping the brushstroke before I reached the end of my nail.  After that base layer dried, I just dabbed with my brush, concentrating at the base, and using the brush to really push the glitter into the places that I wanted it.  It's easy to play around with the glitter to get it looking just how you want it.  Finish with a nice, thick top coat.  Looks awesome starting from the tip, too.

  This is the same grey as above, only looking totes diff!  Awesome!  The glitter is Sephora by OPI in Spark-tacular!  (God, these names....)  But really, this is an awesome polish, and I love it so much I just might marry it.  The photos barely do it justice, but I tried, which is why you get to behold it in blurry realism and also with wrinkle-and-blemish heightening flash!  How lucky for you!

  Now, I really thought I had more lovely grey manicures to share today.  I guess this is not much at all like 50 Shades of Grey, except that trying to photograph that grey was torture.  (Ba-dum tsschhh!  I'll be here all week...)

Matte Magenta Moons

  All the nail blogs say the easy way to do a moon manicure is to mask off the moon area with one of those round-sticker-binder-ring-protector-thingies to make the moon shape.  They're easy to find anywhere, and they're not so sticky they'll peel up your base coat, which I suppose makes them fairly ideal.  I've always been a bit skeptical about it - are the circles the right size?  Will they stick well enough to prevent leakage?

  So I decided to find out.    

  I thought the overall effect was...okay.  I'm not thrilled, and I think I could do a nicer job by hand after three glasses of wine, even.  Hey, sometimes I get better at this shit when I'm drinking!

  Anyhoo, there was minor seeping, especially at the corners!  In fact, the binder rings are rather thick for a sticker, and they kept trying to pop off the edges of my nails!  I have very curved nails, so if you have a flatter nail plane you may have more luck.  This was a total pain-in-the-ass for me.

  To conclude this experiment, but not this post, I would say that I prefer not to use a masking method for the moon manicure, or at least not with binder rings.  However!  This method is useful if you want a 'moon' that is a lighter or sheerer shade that won't work as a top layer.  For this mani I used Sally Hansen Smooth Perfect in Dune as the moon color, which is a lovely sheer nude that would never show up over anything!  The top is Revlon Plum Seduction, which is a really lovely magenta.

 Finally, I decided this would be a good look to try with the new matte top coat I just got!  Inspired by a shiny-black on matte-black french manicure I saw, I have been dying to play with matte colors!  It's about time a matte top-coat was made readily available!  I've always hated how the oh-so-necessary protective top-coat always ruined the finish of a matte polish.  BUT NO MORE!  Behold!  The matte-ness!

Regular polish on top; with matte top coat on bottom.

 Yeahhh!  I think it turned out puh-retty sweet!  It's a bit less drastic a difference due to my camera's overactive flash, but I think it's a pretty good representation of what we're working with, here.  I paid like, ten bucks for this matte top coat, goddamnit, so it better work!
  Oh yeah,  it's Sephora by OPI brand, if you are interested.  It was the only one I could just walk to a store and buy, because no drugstores seem to have caught on yet, but I work a block away from Sephora.  (Danger ranger!)

  You can really see on the thumb in the bottom image, how the light diffuses much more softly on the matte finish.
  The only downside to the matte is that it tends to highlight any imperfections in your base.  I felt like uneven spots or brush streaks were more apparent after I applied the matte, so that's something to think about if you're gonna try it!  Nonetheless, I'm excited to try some new looks with this stuff!  One day I'll make the black-on-black look as good as the pros...my attempts so far have been too embarrassing to share - I'm sure you understand.

So, THIS happened...

 Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to a rousing adventure in WTF-land!

 So, I keep my vast collection of nail polish in a plastic bin with a lid that barely stays on anymore.  It's about as deep as it is wide (approx 1.5 feet square), so when you have as many nail colors as I do, you have to dump out the whole stupid bin every time you want a color that isn't on the uppermost layer.  One day, I'll buy myself one of those classy-as-fuck clear acrylic racks that salons use to display their laquers.   I'll mount it on my goddamn living room wall, and forever after enjoy manicure convenience.  Until then, though, I have this shitty bin. 

 Now, despite how much pressure the bottom layer is surely always under, I've never had any issues.  I mean, shit, any polish you buy is like 50% super thick glass bottle!  Those things are indestructible!!

Right?

....

......

Ahem.  So, with this line of thinking, you can imagine my surprise when I dumped out the box and found this.

Shit, and it's an OPI color, too!  I usually only get those as gifts, since I don't like spending more than six dollars on a bottle of polish.  RIP Yes I Can-Can, you were a great color.  Now I need a new sexy dark red, STAT!

70's Beach House Manicure

  "I'm gonna call this manicure House of Sand and Fog, cuz it's beachy as fuck!"

 I am RRREEEAALLLYY excited about this manicure!  A fabulous geometric look starring my favorite color palette, and featuring my debut use of skinny nail tape!

 This lovely harlequin pattern was lifted right from Chalkboard Nails, and all I did was flip it 'round and change up the colors a bit.

  I'm really into this muted, faded-70s-basement palette.  I just cannot get enough peach!  Colors used here are my beloved Savina White Lavender as the base color, accented with Sally Hansen's Commander in Chic (slate brown), and First Kiss (that's the light coral).  And, of course, lovely Revlon in Jaded, and Minted, (both of which I am LOVINGGGG!) as well as Make Mine Mango (dark coral.)  Jaded is that oh-so-totally-not-Jade-colored chartreuse, and it is pretty much the shit.  Almost neon without going whole hog, but still totally jarring and flashy.  I needed one color to take my palette out of the safety zone!  I think having one clashing color can really make the whole palette pop a bit more.  Nothing worse than a mani design that ends up being a washout!

  You can see the chartreuse at work here, totally punching up that minty green and playing off the blue tones, and brightening that darker coral, too.

  I'm really into this design and this color palette, and I'm gonna have to just come out and say it - I think this one my be my favorite.  Maybe my favorite ever.  Basically I love this mani so much I want to marry it.  MAYBE I WILL!

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

Ever notice how in any public restroom, people act like EVERYTHING is dirty?  Everything except the toilet paper that's been sitting in the stall near the toilet all day, that is...