Experimenting with Emerald

Sometimes you just have an off day. Working all day but not getting anything done, arguing with loved ones over a misunderstood sentence or a petty detail, messing up the execution of a very cute manicure idea and getting nail polish all over the place. That was me yesterday.

It's not often I grab a wet nail in utter frustration, but it doesn't never happen.

One theme for this blog is certainly my relationships with trends. Some trends, like metalics, I embrace and love right away. Others, like gel manicures, I am pretty sure I'll never be on board with. Yet another class of trends are those that right now there is part of me that cannot imagine being into but another part knows that I am stubborn at first but easily persuaded over time so maybe I will be eventually. (Did that even make any sense?) Almond-shaped nails are in this category.

Emerald as the color of 2013 is a trend that I don't love but that I can live with and, if I'm honest, it's fun to be creative with something I feel unenthusiastic about and turn it into something I feel ownership over and happy about.

So yesterday I gave myself a messy but serviceable emerald/teal french manicure. Most of my nails are teal with an emerald tip and three are solid emerald, two because I decided emerald with a teal tip wasn't doing it for me, and the third because I just kept messing up the tip so I decided to make the whole thing emerald. (Actually this was a case of having the tip almost perfect and ruining it by trying to make it a little better. Arg.)

The final result, with Color Club's Wild Cactus and

 Age of Aquarius clutched in my frustrated little claws.

Despite my frustration with applying the nail polish, getting it all over my hands and even on my clothing (luckily my Sunday sweatpants are already green-on-green, so it's not too noticeable), and getting textured imprints on almost-but-not-quite perfectly dry nails, I really like how successful this manicure was at turning me around on emerald. It looks chic and not at all Christmasy on the nails where it is solid, making me think having most of my nails be solid emerald with a few accent nails would also not have the side effect of "O Tannenbaum" getting stuck in my head.

Green sweatpants in the background. Would you have gone back and tried to correct

 the tip of the middle finger or just left it be?