Fox nails

I know I’ve been posting Disney nails while I’ve been gone, but I ran out of Disney nails to post so now you are finally going to see the nails I had for Thanksgiving. I loved these nails and I got a ton of compliments on them. Some of my favorite questions I got about these nails were “so how do you put those on, cause I mean there is no way you painted all those lines?” and “that’s a sticker, right?”. Oh, the joy I find when people think my nails are fake or that I used a nail sticker, I’m such an odd duck. Needless to say, these nails were a pretty big hit at Thanksgiving dinner this year.

Like many of my nail art choices, these nails got a terrible song stuck in my head for the duration I had them on. If you haven’t seen What Does the Fox Say? I highly recommend you leave my blog for a few minutes and bask in the strange glory that only YouTube can bring. Finished watching it? Great, for this manicure I used Zoya Channing, Orly Liquid Vinyl, OPI Alpine Snow, and Maybelline Dotty. For those of you keeping track, this is the first time I’ve used Maybelline, and yes, that does make me sound pretentious.

Fox nails

I’m pretty sure this fox is saying “I’m super cute”. I was worried at first that the fox looked too much like a cat but when my 2 ½ year old nephew looked at them and said “fox” I knew that they must have turned out pretty well. (Yes I squealed like a small child when he was able to correctly guess the animal without prompting). I did a fox on my thumb too but none of the pictures turned out very well.

Ringa-ding-ding-ding-doo

I had a few people tell me these were their favorite nails yet, and I totally agree that these are some of my favorites. They were so cute but not so cartoony that I felt weird having them on. One of my good friends from high school and college married a Mr. Fox so now whenever I see a fox I think of her, hopefully she approves of his foxiness J

Snow White nails

Right after we booked our Disney vacation I decided I wanted to try to see all the Disney animated movies that I had either only seen once or I hadn’t ever seen. This ended up being a much harder task than I originally thought. I’m still about 10 movies shy of seeing all of them (and by all of them I mean the main theatrical releases). Some of them are so obscure and no one seem to have them; however, this is a quest I will finish, you will not best me Disney animated classics. I really want to see the newest movie Frozen, it looks so cute and I just know after I watch it I will think of fun Frozen nails to do.

For this manicure I’m going to focus on the first Disney princess. I haven’t seen Snow White since I was a kid, but I remember it being kinda scary, especially when the wicked queen dresses as the old lady, sorry for the spoiler. For this manicure I used China Glaze Splish Splash, Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up, and Orly Liquid Vinyl.

Snow White nails

These nails looked way cooler in my head and I think part of the problem was that my red sucks. I really need to invest in a more saturated red, the Sally Hansen is a great color but it is very thin so it doesn’t work the way I want it to for nail art. The same can be said of my yellow striper but I don’t use yellow stripers enough for it to bother me like the red situation does. My problem is whenever I go to the store to buy a new solid red I end up buying some glittery fun red, and although that color is fun, it doesn’t replace the solid red like I need it to. Maybe I should put that on my Christmas list.

I keep finding myself singing to woodland creatures with these nails

This is the first time I’ve tried to do a French manicure with the curved line instead of a line that goes straight across, I used hole punch reinforcements as my guide instead of regular scotch tape. The reinforcements worked fine except they didn’t go all the way across on a few of my nails so I had to free hand the edges. Doing the curved line makes them look more feminine I think, I’m going to have to play around with these reinforcements more.

Disney Princess nails

Every once in a while I do nails that I simultaneously love and hate; these are some of those nails. As soon as I did them I thought they were so cute and I was very happy with how they turned out. A day later, however, I started to think that they were staring at me, and by the day after that I had to take them off because they were creeping me out too much. They kept staring at me while I was typing at work, like ten creepy little kids, always watching, always judging. For some reason, I’m don’t like it when my nails could be the subject of a scary movie.

General creepiness aside, these nails are super cute and they really turned out just like I pictured them. For this manicure I used a ton of different polishes: Orly Prelude to a Kiss and Liquid Vinyl, OPI Alpine Snow, Ulta Sun-Sational, Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up, China Glaze Turned up Turquoise, Zoya Louise, and various stripers.

Disney Princess nails

I think these nails would be better on shorter nails; some of my princess (especially on my right hand) didn’t have the right face proportions because my nails are so long. To be honest, my right hand looked like a bunch of jacked up step sisters and not the real princess at all. I always seem to have issues getting my edges right when I use that Orly, it isn’t a forgiving color at all.

Let’s just pretend there aren’t a bunch of technical issues with these nails

These are definitely the kind of nails that look better from far away; the closer you get to them the creepier they are. I think Jasmine turned out the best and I bet that is partly because she is the smallest one. I want to try this art out on someone with shorter nails and nail beds, perhaps in two years when I can paint my god daughter’s nails I will try it out on her, but perhaps it is way too early to be planning such things. Hope you are enjoying my Disney nails while I’m enjoying Disney J

Disney's Tangled nails

I’m not a fan of kids but I love many of the things that they love, Disney is no exception. I first went to Disney World when I was a senior in college and my super amazing coach took me to the Magic Kingdom when we were in Florida for a tournament. I was hooked from my very first glimpse of Cinderella’s castle. Thad’s first trip was on our honeymoon, aka the best honeymoon destination ever. This December marks our third trip together and also our third trip in just over five years, we can’t stay away! So while I’m enjoying the sights and sounds of the most magical place on Earth, I decided to have a couple of blog posts for you to entertain you with Disney nails while I’m at Disney.  

Tangled is such a great movie, if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend that you put it on your list to watch. Also, if you haven’t seen it, these nails won’t be as fantastic for you. For this manicure I used Sally Hansen CSM Anenome of Mine, OPI You’re Such a Budapest, I Saw. . .U Saw. . .We Saw. . .Warsaw, Alpine Snow, and Pussy Galore, Ulta Sun-Sational, and Orly Liquid Vinyl. These nails turned out even better than I had imagined, they are quite possibly some of my favorites I have done.

Disney’s Tangled nails

If you have seen the movie the nails are pretty self explanatory. In case you missed the instant Disney classic, my pinkie and ring finger are parts of her dress, middle finger is her hair (she is Rapunzel after all), my index finger is for the lanterns they light for her birthday every year, and my thumb is the royal symbol. I’m impressed with how well the thumb turned out, I figured I’d try to do something like the sun symbol and it would fail miserably so I would just hide my thumb, I guess when you set your expectations so low you are more likely to impress yourself.  

Seriously, watch the movie

I got Tangled for my birthday from a friend at work and I totally watched it while I was painting these. Hope these nails brought you some Disney joy J

China Glaze - Creative Fantasy nails

I can’t believe how close it is till our Vacation! We leave in just a few days and I’ve been running around like a crazy person these last couple of weeks trying to get everything ready for our trip. Today on my list of things to do: wash all the blankets in the living room, vacuum the couch and chair, and give the dogs a bath. I didn’t think everything through and definitely didn’t do these tasks in the right order. I had two wet dog just rub their wet puppy fur all over the furniture that had been thoroughly vacuumed and just cleaned blankets. Oh well, at least everything ended up a bit cleaner than it was to start the day.

Also on my list of things to do is getting caught up on my nails that need to be blogged. I did these nails for the Vikings game we went to in October; they just kept slipping through the cracks. For this manicure I used China Glaze Creative Fantasy, Sally Girl Matte Top Coat, Ulta Sun-Sational, and OPI Alpine Snow. I decided to do the matte finish tips because the Vikings have a matte finish on their helmets this year.

China Glaze Creative Fantasy nails

This China Glaze is just about the perfect Vikings purple ever. If you are a Vikings fan and want to paint your nails, you really just need to buy this color. It worked perfect with the matte topcoat and ended up looking just like their helmets, the color did anyway.

Skol!

I did the pink line because this was for a game in October and the NFL has their Crucial Catch campaign in October for breast cancer. These nails weren’t super football-ly but I liked the way they turned out. I feel like I’m running out of ideas for Vikings nails, but since we only go to about one game a year I have plenty of time to plan out my next nails J

Ulta - Fairy Dust nails

Every once in a while I get tired of my nails being gaudy, I know that is a shocking statement, but it is true. For the most part, I love when my nails are super distracting and crazy, but every now and then it is nice to have nails that don’t make strangers comment on them. Don’t get me wrong, strangers of the internet, I generally love it when you ask me where I got my nails done, in fact it brings me quite a bit of joy when that happens. Despite this, it came to pass that I got a free color of pretty tame polish at Ulta so I decided to paint my nails in a classy, non flashy kind of way.

These nails didn’t photograph very well, I actually really liked them in person, they were just pretty and simple. For this manicure I used my FREE Ulta Fairy Dust, and Zoya Maria Louisa and Louise. This is my first Ulta that is from their professional collection, to be honest, I didn’t notice much of a difference between the formula for this one and their regular ones. I used three coats for this manicure because I knew that I wasn’t going to put a bunch of art on top of it and I wanted to make sure the color was even. I don’t have any complaints about Ulta’s formula, they don’t have the best selection of colors but the price is amazing so that evens things out.

Ulta Fairy Dust nails

I think the two Zoya colors are from their fall collection, I got a total of three from that collection and I’m very happy with all of them. Zoya makes such nice colors, even if some of them are a bit of a pain to remove. I need to come up with other ways to use the gold color, it is so cool but it has to be layered on top of another color in order for it to look right, I’ll have to play around with it.

I had to add a little bit of bling J

I thought it was funny that these nails got attention at work simply because they were so much tamer than my normal nails. It was nice to take an ugly nail break but I’m sure it won’t last long J

Day of the Dead nails

I’m so ashamed that I’m posting my Halloween day nails almost a month after I painted them, I’m hoping that all of my dedicated readers will forgive me, I am lazy after all. We are going on vacation soon and I feel like I’m being swallowed by my endless lists of things I need to get done. We planned this trip about 10 months ago so you would think that I would have had all sorts of time to get everything done, but for some reason it feels like I crammed everything into the last few weeks. I still haven’t decided what nails I’m going to do for the trip, that’s how busy I’ve been!

But I digress; I hope these nails are worth the wait, they were pretty cool. For this manicure I used Orly Liquid Vinyl, Skinny Dip, and White Tips, China Glaze Pool Party and Turned Up Turquoise, Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up, and Ulta Sun-Sational. These nails were more appropriate for the day after Halloween than for Halloween itself, but it was still fun to have little skulls on my nails for Halloween.

Day of the Dead nails

The best part of these nails was when I took pictures of them and my camera put boxes around each nail as if they were faces, the worst part of these nails was that it was like ten creepy little skulls were staring at me while I was trying to do things like type. It is a general rule of thumb that being a little creeped out by your nails isn’t a good thing.

Cute and Creepy

I truly hate painting my nails white, I don’t know what it is with me but the cuticles always look terrible when I use a white base color. It’s like I’m incapable of painting them correctly as soon as white is added to the equation. Or perhaps I always paint them wrong but the white is just more unforgiving than other colors. Either way, I’m staying away from white for a while.