New week, new city, new nails

Not having to work on Sunday is a weird feeling. So is being in an apartment without Internet, which is exactly where I am right now, in Milwaukee. 

On days like these, I tend to create reasonably elaborate manicures and I also tend to spend a ridiculous amount of money at Walgreens (and not be able to really remember what it was I bought there several hours later).

One thing I do recall buying is gold glitter nail polish. Here's what a lonely and disoriented Sunday has resulted in in terms of my hands. 

I always take pictures on my phone so I don't know why updating from it leads to poorer photo quality but it does. 

Happy June, everyone! Wish me luck for meeting my new roommate and finding my class via the Milwaukee bus system tomorrow. (And for successfully obtaining the shockingly large quantity of items I forgot at Walgreens.)

More like "This Month's Nails"

So I haven't been posting for a while. Sorry! May is my busiest month at work. Also some exciting things have been happening in terms of employment (as opposed to subcontracting)... So send me your good vibes as I navigate various state and local bureaucracies!

Just because I have not been writing doesn't mean I have not been manicuring. Or photographing. So here are some recent looks my digits have been sporting!


One trend I have really liked is just a plain matte color in a paste-like tone. I did this with mauve and gray (apparently, though, I only photographed the gray in very bad lighting):

Just take my word for it - it looked awesome. I thought it was both stylish and professional enough to wear to my job interview.

This was photographed nearly a week after the manicure was actually done. It does show a little wear and tear, but really not that much. Another perk of the matte top coat is how well it improves polishes' staying power!


At the beginning of the month (I guess?) when my nails were short, I did a similar pastel look, but kept the polish's intended shimmery finish.

This look is not in fashion right now, but I think it is classic, classy, and totally worth having somewhere in my manicure rotation.


Another look I tried was floral-inspired nail art. I'd love to hear what you guys think about this because basically I hated both these looks and took them off pretty much right after photographing them. What do you think?

This incorporates the idea of petals, matte emerald, and pastel purple and pink. For some reason it didn't do it for me though. (Note my awesomely colored purple walls as the background, though.)

This, I realize, may not look floral at first glance, but is a riff on a dandy-lion themed dress I have. I think it's the yellow in it that's so irritating and I might try the design on the tips again with a different base color (teal? purple? gray?) underneath.

And finally, here is what my hands look like right now. 

I'm not sure whether I'll post more or less frequently during my super-busy summer... Thanks for hanging in there so far and stay tuned to find out!

Back on the Glitter Wagon

What can I say? Primates like shiny things. Here are three recent sparkled-up manicures:

1. White on White (with some gold mixed in too)

You can also see my fancy purple wall color. Yay purple!

I started out by thinking of this as white vs. white, since I started out by painting one hand with Sinful Colors' Snow Me White and the other with Color Club's French Tip to make a comparison between the two. I found, though, that the only real difference was maneuverability. True to the purpose expressed in its name, French Tip was much easier to handle than Snow Me White. Since it's cheaper, I think I'll stick with using this one as a base and reserve French Tip for, well, french tips.

Something about this manicure that I loved but that did not show up well in any pictures was actually the white on white part. On top of the white bases mentioned above, I put a layer of Sinful Color's Tokyo Pearl (not covering the whole nail, but leaving the sides unpainted, as you can see I also did on the gold nails), a layer of Sally Hansen's Disco Ball, and finally a layer of matte-ifying top coat. I am super into the subdued shimmer of matte glitter.


2. Brightening Up Gray

Lonesome Dove by Confetti, Fantasy by Sinful Colors, 

and something black from Birchbox whose label fell off. Oops!

Okay, so there has been an absolute dearth of gray days here lately and I have loved putting together my deck furniture, admiring my boyfriend's gardening skills, and walking around on the grass in bare feet. Yay summer!

Pastels in general are in this season, and by itself this muted gray could be a classy but not flashy way to flaunt your style. Of course I could not leave it at that, so I tried out the super-thin black brush from to create a diagonal and then filled in one half of each nail with sparkle. This look and its smell were both heartily disapproved of by Brian.


3. Purple with a Pop

Mmm that name sounds like grape soda to me. Actually this was the look I decided on for the wedding I went to last weekend, where the food was even more delectable than any memories of summertime sodas. This is just Rimmel London's Wild Orchit, with a couple of whole nails getting the glitter treatment courtesy of Sinful Color's Fantasy, and a layer of matte-ifier over the whole thing. Delish!


For next week's nails (and beyond) I'm trying to convince myself to try the ombre look, but it seems like it will take so much patience! Has anyone out there been successful with it?

Review: Tea Fragrant Nail Polish

You guys know I love Walgreens. While I was there picking up some things to help me organize my new office, I could not resist also getting a new nail polish. I'd been thinking of a latte-like color to use as a base for French and French-inspired manicures, and this is what I decided on.

Tea Beauty's Vanilla Petals

It wasn't until I was checking out that I realized this is a scented nail polish - Vanilla Petals is not just the name, it's also the flavor. This was interesting for my boyfriend, who normally claims I am trying to poison him with chemicals because of the smell - even several hours after my manicure has dried. He even (if unenthusiastically) approved the scent.

I was pleased with how this look came out. (I also used my now go-to Revlon base coat, Color Club's French Tip, and a Sinful Colors top coat.) This was exactly what I'd had in mind, kind of glamorous and up-to-date but at the same time not shiny or overstated. (I am on a shiny hiatus after last week.)

Re-imagined French: diagonals instead of tips

This morning, though, as happens, I got bored and decided to move on to another look, perhaps even one that will last until the wedding I'm excited to be attending this weekend, and to my horror I found that the scented polish had stained my nails yellow! I am thinking it also might have been the combination of the Tea Beauty polish and the Color Club polish, but I can't say for sure.

Ew. 

Nail polish remover would not remove this stain.

I'm also not sure yet whether I'd recommend that others try out this type of polish. I think I'll get a flashier color to wear by itself and see if the results and after-effects are the same. (You could say I need a larger N, where N = nail polishes.) For now I'm going to wash the dishes and see if the dish soap has any success removing these ugly yellow stains.

Have any of you tried scented nail polishes? Have you ever had a polish leave such an ugly stain on your nails (even with a base coat!)? Leave a comment and let me know!

Spring Sparkles

So I've been really busy with cleaning and moving into my new house - and tons of other activities: translating and editing, planning my summer, etc. etc. All this does not mean I've stopped giving myself manicures, just that I've stopped telling you about them. So here is a collection of recent ones.

A theme that has emerged over the past couple of weeks is sparkles. I bought some various glitter polishes on a recent trip to Walgreens (kind of obsessed with Walgreens right now, to be honest), but really I've only used one of them: Sally Hansen's Disco Ball (on the right).

Also pictured: Sinful Colors' Fantasy

Recently I also added a new classic red to my collection, Color Club's Look Book. Here it is with a couple of coats of the glitter over it. I tried to layer so the glitter would be thickest at the bottom and thinnest at the top, but I'm not sure how discernable it is. I plan to work more on the graduated look in the future, probably not until my office is totally set up.

You can pretty much never go wrong with red nails. 

(At least according to my boyfriend.)

Something else I did was super-girly pink-on-pink with two pinks I bought last year when I was really into pink nails. (This was in part due to the influence of my guiltiest guilty pleasure TV show, the Bachelorette... Another post on that will possibly follow.) Adding to the effusive girlie-ness was, of course, a layer of sparkle on top. Not sure exactly why, but this look (minus the diagonals) really brought me back to 1996.

OMG pink!

Sinful Colors' Easy Going underneath Sinful Colors' Soul Mate

My third and most favorite of the sparkle looks was diagonal swipes of glitter (two coats) over Color Club's Status Update. Part of me thinks I just love this color for layering, since I also think it looks fab under gold. Brian invariably thinks it looks trashy, though, so there you go. There's no accounting for taste. 

You love it as much as I do, though, right?

Unfortunately with me there is no accounting for planning, either, since I put this polish on less than a day before I'd planned to help some friends of mine who are new parents clean their bathroom, so the look didn't last long. Oops.

Are you guys as into glitter this season as I am? What have your go-to manicure looks been so far this spring?

Delayed Beautification: Two Online Nail Sign-ups

I work online, I am new in my town, and there have only been a couple of days so far this spring that it's been nice enough to just go play outside. (Today will be one of them, though!) The result is that I spend a lot of time on the internet. A lot.

Besides being terrible for carpal tunnel syndrome and other parts of my body, being a connectivity junkie has its perks: not only have I gotten way better at Words with Friends, I have also learned about some up-and-coming nail ventures available to consumers on the web. Without further ado, here they are!

I'm not sure I'll ever be skilled enough to freehand like this.

(Image from the Scratch website.)

Scratch
This LA-based company is seeking to combine the trend of nail wraps with actually trendy patterns and nail art, instead of the floral, boring, and/or leopard print patterns currently common to nail wraps. Their Kickstarter campaign has already raised more than four times its goal, with nearly three weeks left to go. Donate and you can try out one (or more) of their nail wraps as a thank-you gift.

Check your mailbox: You've got nails!

(Image from the Laquerous website.)

Laquerous
A subscription-based service, not unlike Netflix, that sends you nail polish in the mail for you to use and return. This is perfect for those who are indecisive about nail color, want to have the feel of expensive polish without the high per-bottle price tag, or want to try before they splurge on expensive polish. I requested a membership a little while ago and haven't heard anything yet, but I'm hoping to get the chance to try out this service soon. (Also I'm a little in awe that they're starting a business based on sending nail polish through the mail, since normally the USPS is not down with that.)

There will be lots of new things to try this spring! Not only have I just found my nail polish collection (which was packed away in a box for the last six months), but I am already behind on trying out the new polishes I picked up last week, so I'd better get going before Scratch and Laquerous put their products in the mail to me!

Any nail news around the interwebs that I've missed? Leave a comment and let me know!

Short and Sweet: Two Fab Looks for Short Nails

Do you guys also have the pet peeve of having your nails different lengths from each other? Personally, anything asymmetrical drives me nuts. (Unless it's lopsided in a purposeful way, like the braid I wear over one shoulder, or a diagonal accent color across one side of a nail.)

One of the absolute worst is nails that are different lengths from each other, since it's not just an aesthetic but also a tactile asymmetry. This is one reason why I will pretty much never leave the house without a nail clipper in my bag, just in case some emergency surgery is necessary.

Unfortunately, when moving into a new house, washing a million dishes that have been in storage for six months, and wresting the tops of tons of unruly boxes, nails are prone to breaking.

Oops.

On the bright side, now I have nails short enough to show off some of my favorite understated short-nail looks (and all the dishwashing has made it necessary for me to wear two of them over the course of the last week).

Number one: White. There are many things to love about it:

• Its a true neutral and goes with anything.
• It always makes your hands look cleaner (a major reason I like having my nails done).
• It matches your Easter shoes. (Happy Bunny Day!)
• It's easy to pull off - not exactly a statement manicure - and yet totally on-trend this spring.
• It looks pretty good even after washing countless loads of dishes; since it's a light color any chips or imperfections are less noticeable.

Imperfect, but still sexy.

Number two: Purple matte. So right after I last posted about not being sure purple was on-trend, I read a whole bunch of blog posts saying that it is. Yay! I'll soon have an eggplant-colored office, and purple has been one of my go-to shades for a while, so I'm ready to celebrate all the different shades from the richer ones to those reminiscent of the springlike scent of lilac.

Purple! Yay! 

(And even in artificial overhead lighting, 

you can see the reduction in shine.)

I used a new base coat and a new top coat in this manicure. The top coat is designed to dampen the manicure's shine - that is to make it look matte - and the bottle proclaims it as "new," which I think is supposed to mean trendy. I actually loved this look in about 1997. (Especially with black nails; I was a little dramatic as a teenager.) So to me, it's better than new: it's a comeback. From the '90s. So here are my new kids on the (nail polish) block:

The right stuff: 

Revlon 790 Matte Top Coat

 Revlon 955 Quick Dry Base Coat

What are your favorite short-nail looks? Are there any looks you like on short nails but not on long nails? Or vice-versa?