Minnie Mouse nails

My goddaughter just turned one and she had a polka dot themed birthday party. As soon as I got the invite I started thinking of all the possible polka dot nails I could do. I think that dots are my favorite nail design, they were certainly my first. When my niece was first born my brother and his wife told me that I could paint her nails when she was three, so I only have two more years to go. I really hope she likes having her nails painted; I want her to think I’m cool and not some crazy woman hell bent on painting her nails.

After looking at many dot possibilities I decided to do Minnie Mouse nails, that way I could do dots and Disney. I got to say, I love these nails. I love them so much that I’ve decided that this is the design I’m going to put on my toes for Disney. For this manicure I used Sally Hansen CSM Frutti Petutie, OPI DS Radiance, Orly Liquid Vinyl and White Tips.

Minnie Mouse nails

How freakin cute are these nails? That’s a rhetorical question; I know how cute they are. The mouse design is so simple but it looks so cute, I was in love with these nails from the first Minnie head. I’m bummed only two pictures turned out of these nails, I don’t remember being drunk when I took them but based on how blurry they all were I must have been wasted, or a bad photographer, one of those.

Not sure why this one is so dark

If I were to do them again I would make the bow bigger and more rounded on the edges, I’m going to leave the bow out all together when I do this design on my toes but that is mostly because it’s almost impossible to do nail art on any toe that isn’t your big toe and I want as many Minnie heads as possible. This design would make a wonderful first nail  art design for my niece when she turns three, perhaps planning the design now would be a little too early though J

Wizard of Oz nails

I don’t have a fun way to start this blog so I’m just going to talk about my nails. I have a post it that I keep a list of nail ideas on and chose this one off the list to do. Without thinking about it I ended up doing two movie themed nails in a row, perhaps I can think of more and do a whole series of them. I feel like I should mention that I don’t actually like the movie Wizard of Oz, the monkeys scared me as a kid (that’s a lie the monkeys still scare the shit out of me). Despite the terrifying monkeys I thought the movie would make for a good muse for my nails and I was right.

These nails are distractingly gaudy, they may even be ugly. For this manicure I used quite a few colors, Orly Skinny Dip, Liquid Vinyl, and White Tips, Sally Hansen CSM All Fired UP, Gilty Pleasure, and Butterscotch, China Glaze Ruby Pumps and Paper Chasing, and OPI DS Radiance.

Wizard of Oz nails

My pinkie is supposed to be the Emerald City but I think it looks more like a pineapple, I guess this means if I ever do Spongebob nails I know how to make his pineapple under the sea. The red nail is supposed to be for Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, I was so happy when I found the red for it and then saw the name was Ruby Pumps so I’m pretty sure that was meant to be.

I’m not sure where the tiny divots on my Tin Man came from

My other nails are for the Tin Man, Dorothy’s dress, and the yellow brick road. I bought Butterscotch for Winnie the Pooh nails, but I thought it made for a good road.I was really happy with how the Tin Man nails turned out, since he was my favorite I had to include something for him.

I liked three pictures, so you get three pictures of these

These nails are fun but not very flattering; they are a bit too bold even for me. I think if I were going to do them again I would choose just two designs and not five different ones (I’d keep the pineapple of course). Now let’s see if I can come up with another movie theme, perhaps one that doesn’t distract me so much J

 

Striped nails

I’ve never been a huge fan of baseball. When I was a kid all my brothers were in little league and I remember being super bored at the games. My dad loved baseball so he would have us all go out to the ballpark on weekends and play as a team. Dad always gave me special rules so that I wouldn’t suck too bad, for instance I got five strikes and if after that I still didn’t hit the ball, he would throw the ball as if I had hit it and let me run to base. Thinking back, I’m pretty sure that I never hit the ball. What can I say? Sports aren’t in my blood, but nails are J

I did these nails for a Twins game this weekend. I didn’t want them to be too basebally (since as previously stated I’m not a huge fan) but I did still want them to be somewhat Twins themed. I found this idea online (cutepolish is amazing) and just had to do it right away. For this manicure I used OPI DS Radiance, China Glaze Splish Splash, Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up, and Orly White Tips. I’ve talked before about how much I hate white polish so I got this Orly to replace my OPI and it is so much better. I think it is most noticeable when you look at the coverage around my cuticles.

Striped nails

These nails were easy but required a lot of work. To do the stripes I used those dental flossers that you get from the drugstore. In order for the paint to stick to them you have to make sure to get the kind that are not ‘glide’, I of course only had that kind so I walked to Wallgreens, they were out, so I walked to CSV and there I found the flossers I needed. At this point I had already put in a lot of work and I hadn’t even started painting my nails!

I always seem to have dog hairs in my pictures

These nails made a much bigger mess than I thought they would, paint got on the plastic edges of the flosser so the paint then got all over the sides of my fingers. They also took a really long time, new paint had to be put on for each stripe and I did each color twice. I didn’t mind how long they took though because I was watching Wreck-it-Ralph and it was a really cute movie.

This makes them look more basebally

I really liked how these turned out and they make me want to do them in different colors, like all different shades of blue would be cool. Hope you liked them too J

Zoya Song tips

Hello again! It’s been too long!! I found that if I don’t blog on the weekend I will not blog at all, it’s a good lesson. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but I’m going to Disney World in 193 days, I’m pretty excited. Because of this awesome trip (and time off for my best friend’s wedding and my dirty thirty) I don’t really have any vacation to use for the rest of the year. I think my job is pretty generous on the time off front and I actually really like my job, but not having a day off can get pretty rough; all that being said, I am so excited for this weekend, the idea of having three days off in a row makes me smile like a crazy person. I started the weekend off right by getting a pedicure with my mom, pedicures are awesome FYI. I’ve also done my fair share of drinking tonight so I apologize in advance if that impacts my blog negatively.

I had this manicure on for less than a day, I’ll let you infer what that means about my feelings about them. For these nails I used Zoya Song and Tanzy and OPI DS Radiance, these are three colors I officially love so it is a shame that these nails don’t rock my socks off.

Zoya Song Tips

I wanted to try to do little tips and see how I like them, I don’t like them. My nails are just too long to pull off the tiny baby tips, they simply look way better on short nails. As for the design, I can’t even tell you what I was going for; it looks like some sort of amoebae.

These nails scream ‘eh’

I know these nails are a disappointment after a long blog drought, but I hope you learn to forgive me with time. I was told at work the other day that someone’s adult daughter read my blog and my mom and brother told me people at their work read it, I just want to say I think that is awesome. If you really like my blog please follow and/or leave comments on it, I really enjoy sharing my nails with everyone J

OPI - DS Radiance

My parents are pretty awesome, I know I’ve mentioned that before, but it bears repeating. We dog sat for them while my newest niece was making her grand appearance and to thank us they decided to grill us steak (in this sentence read ‘they’ to mean ‘dad’). My dad is an amazing cook, especially when fire and meat are involved. His grill is epic; it was specially made just for him and it weighs like 800 pounds. The steaks he made were ridiculous; they weighed a pound and a half each (don’t worry fitness center ladies, I didn’t finish mine). To go with these monster porterhouses, he made huge baked potatoes and amazing stuffed mushrooms - all that food just for watching their sweet little beagle for a few days, totally worth it. Now that I made everyone jealous and hungry, I’ll move on to totally unrelated nails J

I love when people at work come up to me to show me their nails, it makes me feel like I’m the resident nail expert, maybe I can get that into my job description. One such work encounter resulted in the idea for these nails, for this manicure I used OPI DS Radiance and Orly Liquid Vinyl. Every time I use that OPI I’m reminded of how awesome it is, the color is just amazing. When it’s wet it looks like metal that has been liquefied, it goes on so easy, and it looks amazing with one coat, what more can I say?

DS Radiance

This is another one of those manicures where I have no answer to the ‘what are those dots?’ question. Despite the fact that I have no idea what the dots are supposed to be, I love this manicure, it is one of my favorites that I’ve done. They are classy, but still whimsical, and the silver is super shiny and distracting, for me they are like nail heaven.

Maybe they look like ants?

I messed up the dots on my pointer finger but otherwise they came out pretty clean. I get over excited when I do this many dots and I forget to clean off my dotter and it results in sticky dots sometimes. I also had a huge problem with dog hair on this manicure, my girls must be shedding and I had to pull out several hairs from my nails, thanks girls. This is the first time I’ve done tips since the big break and I love the proportion, perhaps I do need to keep them this length.

I love them so much you get three pictures

I’ve been painting my own nails for over a year now, I just renewed my Sally’s card. For everyone who looks at nail art and thinks they can do it I have to say that you can, it really does just take practice. My nails are so much better than when I started, I can’t say I’ve saved money or time, but I’ve had a lot of fun painting my nails, and for me that’s more important J

Pins for Paws Bowling nails

On Sunday I got to volunteer for the local animal shelter in one of the most fun ways possible; my work had two teams at the Pins for Paws event so I got to bowl for puppies. I’m a terrible bowler, like really bad, I bowled a 68 my first game and a 79 during the second game (I got a strike!). I always have fun bowling even though I’m horrible at it (no offense to anyone reading this and thinking that I bowl better than them). I was very worried about breaking a nail while I was bowling and my fears were not helped when someone said “how can you wear those? You are going to break them all off!” This comment was met with my standard “they are real” and “OMG why would you say that?!?!?!” I’m at bit ashamed to say that I actually said the letters O, M, and G. Somehow I managed to not break any of my nails and I’m going to say that is why my game suffered.

For this manicure I decided to do paws (again) but to give them a bowling theme so they matched the event. I used China Glaze Rich & Famous and Gothic Lolita, OPI Alpine Snow, DS Radiance, and Deutsch You Want Me Baby? and Orly Liquid Vinyl.

Pins for Paws nails

I’m terrible at painting nails all white, I don’t know if I put on the coats too thick or don’t do enough of them, but they always look terrible, like chunky streaky messes. I also hate how all white nails look on me, but this might be because I can’t seem to paint them right. Despite all my thoughts on white nails, I really wanted to have some of my nails look like bowling pins, so I went with this design. My thumb is supposed to look like a bowling ball but I’m not so sure how well that really turned out.

Bowling ball thumb?

These nails aren’t my favorite but they worked well for the event. I think it is odd that I have found a reason to do paw print nails three times since starting my blog. I must really like puppies J.

China Glaze - Blue Bells Ring

For Christmas my brother-in-law got me a $15 gift card to Sally’s, I’m sure he thought he got the most boring gift ever, but to me it was magical. I was able to prolong the shopping adventure until Saturday and it was as glorious as I had imagined. For $15 (and five cents) I got six polishes as Sally’s, I should point out that I also had a coupon, a 15% off, and my Sally’s card, that’s right, I’m the shit at polish shopping.

Two of the polishes I got were Seche Vite top and base coat; so far I love the base coat as much as I love the top coat, thank you SV for being awesome. The other four are all colors so being the totally normal, rational person I am, I tried to use all four colors in one manicure, that manicure failed. That manicure failed so bad I have no pictures of it. It was a hot mess on my hands, and to make it better the blue I used wouldn’t come off so it kind of looked like I slaughtered an entire community of Smurfs (I smurfed them good in their smurf). By the time I finished cleaning up the Smurf gore I had had quite a bit to drink so I was nervous how my next attempt would go, considering the preamble, I’m pretty pleased with these nails.

They are so super shiny

For this manicure I used China Glaze Blue Bells Ring (AKA the Smurf bringer), Orly Angel Eyes, and OPI DS Radiance. The base blue is the China Glaze; I put the Orly on my ring fingers and then proceeded to put so much decoration on those nails you can hardly tell that there is a glitter overlay. Blue Bells Ring was on clearance at Sally’s, which along with the name makes me think it is part of a holiday collection. It is a great color, the coverage I crazy amazing. Believe it or not, I’m only wearing one coat in these pictures, crazy right?

One coat!

The color is much darker on than it looks in the bottle but has a great silver sparkle to it. It is a huge pain in the butt to remove though and completely stains your hands. I think it is a testament to how much I like the color that I would use it again after the first clean up. I’m pretty sure Angel Eyes is also a holiday color, it is a dense blue micro glitter with medium sized holographic glitter. I’m excited to use it again when I can get a better idea of what it looks like.

You can kind of see some of the holographic glitter

These nails are very messy, and I totally messed up on my line work, but they turned out very flashy and fun. I was informed afterwards that they are the school colors of a local high school, so my nails totally say ‘go bulldogs’.

Polar Bear nails

Happy New Year! Thad and I are not really party animals so our New Year plans included going grocery shopping and getting to bed at a decent hour. We did have a fun couple of days prior to New Year’s Eve though; we took a trip to the big city to hang out with family. Because I’m kinda weird, I took polish with me and did my sister in law’s nails. For her manicure I used OPI Brisbane Bronze, China Glaze Glitter Goblin, and Sally Hansen CSM Gilty Pleasure. Her nails are so much smaller than mine that it took a few tries before I picked something that worked. She seemed to like them and loved the SV topcoat because of its awesome dry time.

 

A well deserved manicure for a busy mama

I did my nails on Saturday before we left for our trip. I wanted fun going out nails but instead chose to do the opposite and did adorable cutesy nails. For my manicure I used Avon Lagoon, China Glaze For Audrey, Fast Track, and Luxe and Lush, OPI Alpine Snow and DS Radiance, and Orly Liquid Vinyl.

Nothing says party like a polar bear

I had so much fun doing these nails and I love how the bears turned out, I think Fast Track was perfect for the bear’s face. I tried a different snowflake pattern than I used last time and I’m not sold on it, I think I liked my first snowflakes better. I used matte topcoat on my pointer finger and for the first time it didn’t really make my polish look matte. I don’t know if that was as much because of the sparkly dots on top or because the blue color is a shimmer.

How can you not love this bear?

They are not party nails, but they are super fun. These nails make me want to try other animal nails. At the end of my last post I mentioned baked potato nails and was told I needed to clarify what I meant by that. An awesome way to remove glitter polish is to dip cotton into remover and then wrap your nail in tin foil with the cotton on the nail. After waiting about 10 minutes the polish comes right off with none of the normal “I hate glitter” frustration. When your nails are all wrapped up I think it looks like you have five little potatoes on your hand.

Baked potato nails and gray sweatpants

If you have never used the method I highly recommend it, not only does it work well but it also looks pretty awesome and makes your hand useless for 10 minutes which is always fun.

Caviar nails

For Christmas my super awesome friend Patty got me a super awesome gift. She told me that she wanted to give me my gift before Christmas because she thought I would “get good use out of it”, I was immediately excited. Patty found forty little bottles of all sorts of different nail swag; everything from loose glitter to foil. I gazed upon my bounty all day at work and will admit that it distracted me from my work more than once (oops).

Gaze upon how amazing this gift is

I had all day to plan what nails I wanted to do and as soon as I saw the bottles with beads I knew I was going to do my first caviar nails. A caviar manicure, for those that don’t know, is a manicure where you cover one or more nails with micro beads so that it looks like caviar. As I have never had caviar I’m not sure how much it actually looks like fish eggs, but you get the general idea. For these nails I used OPI DS Radiance and some blue micro beads.

I can’t stop running my caviar nails against things, they feel cool

I made a lot of mistakes with these nails due to poor planning. For some reason I decided that I should paint all he silver nails first and then do the ring fingers, that was a stupid decision. While I was attempting to dip the ring fingers in my vat of micro beads I ended up hitting the silver nails on just about everything. It was at this point I realized that very metallic polishes are not forgiving at all. Every mistake and bump shows up glaringly, even after top coat.

You can see the mistake in my thumb and pinkie L

My favorite thing about this whole manicure is the texture, the silver nails and very soft and smooth because of the high quality polish and top coat and then the caviar nails are really bumpy even with three coats of top coat. When I put the top coat on the beads it pulled off some of the blue color which made some beads look more silver, the overall effect turned out well though.

So fun

I’m a little worried about taking the beads off but I’m hoping the glitter/foil method works out for it. Thank you Patty for the awesome gift, I’m super excited to come up with more ways to use it!