Request Nails

Today I had my first manicure request. I was walking on the treadmill on my lunch (I don’t know what to do on these hour long lunch breaks I have now) when one of my lovely coaches requested I do a white and black manicure. Not being one to say no to my adoring public, I painted my nails that very night (after eating like 8 pancakes, sorry Natasha). I think they turned out pretty cool, although my line work is pretty bad, we can blame that on my syrup high. For these by request nails I used Sally Hansen CSM Shell We Dance?, Orly Liquid Vinyl, OPI Alpine Snow, and some striper polish. Side note about the black, you may have noticed I use black a lot. I actually didn’t own black polish until quite recently. Growing up black nail polish (for anything other than lady bug spots and the like) was banned in my home along with hair dye, and all makeup. I was with my mom when I bought the Orly, I felt dangerous and grown up. I’ve found since this moment of rebellion that I really like black polish and I’m a huge fan of pairing it up with other colors. It seems like I should post a picture of my mom here but she would hate that, so instead here a picture of her nails when she let me do them.

Strawberry manicure, we had a long discussion of what color strawberry seeds are

I really like Shell We Dance? as a base coat, it works well when you want a bare nail look but your nails aren’t nice enough to sport the tips nude. I didn’t think I would get to type “sport the tips nude” today, it sounds way too gross to include in a blog that also mentions my mom.

 

 

They kind of remind me of Minnie Mouse

I hope you enjoyed the nails Natasha!

Countdown

My birthday is pretty much my favorite day of the year. When I was growing up my parents had a rule that you couldn’t talk about your birthday until the person with the birthday before yours had their special day, I was not a fan of this rule and in retrospect I bet they made the rule because of me. One of my brother’s has a birthday just 17 days before mine (I won’t even pretend that I didn’t keep count), because of his poor birthday planning (maybe I should blame that on mom?) I only had 17 days to bask in the glow of my soon to be big day. I then had the misfortune to meet the love of my life, fall in love, and marry him. His birthday is 8 days before mine, 8. I now only get one week to talk about my birthday, one week to cram a year of excitement in. Just one week. As you may have guessed, today starts my birthday week. I decided to start this glorious week by taking a small look back at how sad my nails used to be. As you remember from my first post (I’ll assume you have it near memorized) I had gel polish manicures for a long time and they left my nails in ruins. I had to keep them painted because they were literally falling apart. As the damage grew out you could actually see the curved line of where the nail grew to. The paint didn’t even hide the line; I just had to stare at it knowing how much I damaged my nice thing.

I used to paint them just one solid color, ahhh memories

 

The color I’m wearing above is the same as one I used today, SallyHansen CSM Gilty Pleasure; I also used OPIAphrodite’s Pink Nightie. How do you get a job naming nail polish? I think I would be awesome at that job, the new Germany collection from OPI has some of the best names ever and I feel like I could be an asset to that team. I want a job that involves nail polish and a thesaurus, is that too much to ask? But I digress, back to my nails. As it is my birthday week and I was feeling nostalgic, I decided to do polka dots. I actually looked at Google search pictures of polka dot manicures for a shameful amount of time; I think I will have to do several dotted manicures in the near future. To do these dots I used my trusty toothpick, not all the dots are even sizes, that is the price you must pay with hobbled together tools.

I think these may start a dot renaissance

 

There are so few shopping days left until my birthday, please consider this your first warning J

Water Marble

I have wanted to try a water marble manicure for a while now; all the videos and pictures online made them look so fun and cool. Last night while my husband was at the Vikings game a friend came over and we set to drinking beer and water marbling our nails. This is not the type of manicure you can do on a whim; there are so many tools and products necessary I felt like we were putting together a science experiment.

What you will need:
paper towels
toothpicks
Q-Tips
nail polish remover
disposable plastic cups
room temp water
name brand tape
3 or more polish colors (I used Sally Hansen CSM Frutti Petutie and Parrot and Savvy Totally Teal, Gayle used Orly Liquid Vinyl and OPI Alpine Snow and Strawberry Margarita)
6 or more beers

Here is the gist on the process, first you lay down some paper towels cause it is going to get messy. Open your first beer. Unscrew all your polish lids so you can work quick like a ninja. Put the water in the cup and get a few toothpicks at the ready. At this point you have the joy to start taping a finger or two, I would suggest to tape and paint your thumbs last as they are the most helpful fingers. Using name brand tape is not optional, for my first three fingers I used Hy-Vee brand tape and as you will be able to see in the pictures below, it left all the adhesive on my finger when I pulled the tape off, once I switched to good old Scotch this problem ended. Open beer number two, you deserve it after the taping work. After your finger is taped you can start putting paint in the water, simply put one drop of a color in the middle of the cup and repeat the process with the other colors, use a toothpick to swirl the colors around to make cool designs. Dip your finger in the part of the design you want, be sure to pull the tape off while the paint is still wet and then fish out the left over paint from your cup before doing the next nail. Some of the nails turned out awesome and some look like vomit but after all the work it was definitely time to open another beer.

As you can see, the paper towel was very necessary

Gayle hated her nails so much she repainted them that night, I thought these two were pretty cool.

 

Before clean up (clean up took until the next day to complete) notice all the lovely adhesive on my fingers. It was awesome when my sheets stuck to them that night.

 

Cleaned up left hand

 

Cleaned up right hand, please ignore the Band-Aid, I may have cut my finger shaving, I’ll let you think about that for a while.

I would totally try this manicure again, it was kind of a pain in the ass (my sister in law would describe it as putsy) but overall it was fun and even the ugly ones look kind of cool.

Girly nails

I often get asked how I have time to paint my nails. I think the answer is really simple, I watch TV a lot and paint my nails while I watch terrible television. For instance tonight I painted them during Say Yes to the Dress and Four Weddings, on Sunday I painted them during the last episode of Sex and the City. I guess the real question is why don’t other people have time for bad TV? When people ask how long it takes to paint my nails, or how I have enough time, it almost feels like they are judging me for spending time on my nails, like there is something better that I could be doing. True, I am not a very good house keeper, weeds have killed two of my lilies, and I feel that dust is a noun and not a verb, but I should be able to spend my time away from work how I please. Manicures usually take me about an hour, most of the time is spent waiting for something to dry (and getting sucked into Law and Order: SVU). My longest manicure by far was my R2D2 nails, but they were so cool. The whole time I had them I flashed them in front of people saying “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”, my little geek heart swelled with happiness.

 

I loved them so much I took pictures before I cleaned them up, I then forgot to take pictures after I did clean them.

For tonight’s nails I decided to go a little girly (I was watching wedding shows after all). I used OPI Rosy Future and Alpine Snow. I love Rosy Future; it is iridescent and so pretty. I decided to try pinstripes (one of the weddings had pinstriped invitations) and although I’m not happy with how they turned out, I am intrigued enough to try them again.

 

Please disregard the weird background.

Hope you enjoyed the nails and don’t forget the show Abby and Brittany premiers next week on TLC, everyone should set their DVR like I did.

Black and Sand

I love to sing to my dogs, I mean I really love to, and if you have had the great honor to hear me sing you know I sing like an angel (by angel I of course mean a stray cat with its tail caught in a blender). Like any good dog mom, I enjoy changing the words of real songs so that they relate better to my little girls. Because of their keen hearing, my dogs rejoice at my singing so much that I feel singing to other people’s dogs is something I should do as often as possible.

Jules enjoying my singing

 

All of this does vaguely relate to my nails. I decided to name them “Black and Sand” because I like to sing Black and Brown (to the tune of Black and Yellow) to my friend’s Doberman. I’m not sure if she was aware that I sing about her dog but now she is. . . and I stole the song from her so I’m doubly weird.  I actually painted my nails last night but didn't have time to write about them because of Grimm, so you can blame Grimm if you were waiting on the edge of your seats for this post. For these K9 inspired nails I used OPI Cozu-Melted in the Sun (greatest name ever) and Orly Liquid Vinyl (I use that one a lot).

I know you want to sing it in your head, “black and sand, black and sand”

Thad suggested last night that I try to do nails like a toucan’s beak so I spent some time today doing Google searches for Toucan Sam, it appears that I need to find a good orange-yellow so I can make them happen.

Reaping day

I like to call the day I repaint my nails ‘reaping day’. Allow me to explain, whenever I buy new polish (I don’t want to admit how often that is) the first thing I want to do it repaint my nails. This was definitely the case when I bought two colors from the Hunger Games collection (China Glaze Electrify and Fast Track), I yearned to repaint my nails in all their Katniss glory but it was right before the fourth of July and I had super tacky go America nails planned next, so the Hunger Games nails had to wait. As soon as my tacky America nails showed the smallest sign of wear I excitedly declared it reaping day and set to repaint my nails.

 The glitter was a pain in the ass to get off but so worth it

The term kind of stuck after that, and by ‘kind of stuck’ I mean that I was the only person who called it that. Anywho, today was a reaping day, but today didn’t go well. I’m going to blame it on the pressure of the blog. My plan was to do my first V manicure, meaning I would tape off Vs and paint them a different color. I used Savvy Totally Teal and I’m going to say that was my first mistake. The polish went on so think that even with my amazing quick dry top coat the tape pulled up layers of paint creating the look of vomit on my nails. I had to take the polish all the way off and repaint my left ring finger three times, as you can see I gave up on the blue and used Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Frutti Petutie. They still looked awful so I covered the whole thing in glitter (Finger Paints Hue Left a Message?) thinking that glitter will have to make them better.

 The offending nails

 

I’m sure these nails will meet their end tomorrow after work, and at that time I will regret my choice of glitter as glitter is a pain the ass to remove (have I already said that?).

On a side note, Microsoft Word wanted to change Katniss to catnip; I was much too excited about that.

Vampire nails

I didn't realize until I looked at the little box that said "title" that I would have to name my nails, this seems like a big responsibility. I mean I know that I named my dog (Millie is the perfect name for a basset hound) but putting a name to nails seems like something a professional would do and I am clearly not a professional. Regardless, the box exists so I have decided to name these nails “vampire nails”. I’ve clearly never met a vampire but I imagine if they existed and decided to paint their nails they would pick black and red, so I’m going to say this is a solid name choice.

In case you were curious about the state of Millie’s nails.

To create my vampire nails I used Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure – All Fired up and Orly – Liquid Vinyl. For the stripes I got an awesome set of striper polishes (Shany) off of Amazon. I’m a huge fan of them, aside from the fact that a few of them are pretty runny they are wonderful. How can you go wrong with 24 colors for $24.99?

Vampire nails

When I started doing my own nail art I did what any good 21^st century girl would do and Googled the hell out of it. I found the tape method worked the best for me when for French tips. For these nails I taped them twice, once for the red and after some top coat and dry time I taped again for the black. Hope you enjoy!

In the beginning

I've always had a thing for nail polish. When I was little I would sit for hours while my dad painted my nails and added polka dots with toothpicks (a technique I totally still use, thanks dad). I remember one time he painted my nails white and put black spots on them so they looked like Dalmatians, let's face it, I looked cool as hell. Teenage me had less than stellar taste in all manner of makeup, I clearly remember painting each nail a different neon color and allowing them to chip at will with no regard for touch ups. It was a dark day for nails.

There are at least twelve things I should have to explain about this picture but I am going to just go ahead and ignore them.

I was broke and lazy in college which isn't the best combination for nails so we will just skip those years. I got my very first manicure for my wedding. I was 25 and hung over from my awesome bachelorette party from the night before. I got a French manicure and totally fell in love, they looked like fake nails and for some strange reason I loved when people assumed they were. My nails went from looking amazing to looking horrific on our honeymoon. Something about the combination of sun block and whatever they put on my nails turned into this sticky layer of pocket lint, food particles, and just general nastiness.

I had the bug, now I didn't just want to have painted nails, I wanted to have super freaking awesome "those must be fake" nails. I had a few manicures over the next year or so but it wasn't until someone at work told me about gel nail polish that my world changed (I don't care how dramatic that sounds). I started getting gel polish manicures and OMG I loved them more than words.

I promise that my photographic skills will get better.

After about 10 straight months of getting gel polish manicures every three weeks (I don’t want to think about how much money I spent on them) my nails were totally wrecked. They were so thin that nail polish removed would soak through to the nail bed, not the best feeling in the world.

This is where my current nail journey began, since my nails were so messed up from the gel polish I had to keep them painted all the time. I missed the fancy nails my ladies at TQ gave me so I was forced to learn how to paint mine, and after spending hours on nail blogs I thought it might be fun to start one as a nail art newbie. Hope you enjoy J