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.

Catching Fire nails

I’m a huge fan of young adult fantasy fiction, especially when it is in a series - I simply can’t resist them. I also love going to see their movie adaptations; I don’t expect them to be just like the books so I am able to enjoy them for what they are. I feel like I’ve been waiting forever for Catching Fire to come out but it finally did so we went to see it last Friday. We decided against going to the midnight show because, quite frankly, I’m too damn old to be going anywhere at midnight (getting back home after 11pm was pushing it for me). The movie was totally worth the wait and the late hour, my favorite part was when it was over and the guy in front of me said “that’s how it ends?” yes sir, that is how it ends.

As soon as I knew we were going to the movie I started thinking about what my nails should look like, obviously. For this manicure I used Ulta Sun-Sational and Orly Liquid Vinyl, as well as some stripers. I’m pretty happy with how these turned out, I thought the fire ended up looking pretty cool and you can tell what the bow and arrow are supposed to be, at least I think you can.

Catching Fire nails

To get the fire look I started with an orange striper and layered lines on my nail, I didn’t put the brush into the bottle very often so the lines ended up kinda wispy. I put red on top of the orange and did the same thing and then topped it off with gold glitter, because I thought fire should be sparkly, and really I’m going to add sparkle to my nails whenever I get the chance.

The tip wear vexes me

I’ve had a lot of trouble with tip wear lately and I’m not quite sure why. My best guess is that I’m going to bed before they are totally dry and then I’m messing the tips up by pulling up our incredibly heavy quilt. We have probably one of the heaviest blankets that has ever existed. A friend from college made it for our wedding and it is equal parts awesome and lead. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get myself to go to bed any later, so perhaps I need to just put up with the tip wear situation.

Candy Corn nails

I hate scary movies, I hate being scare in general and try to avoid it at all costs (that’s why I like the little baby roller coasters at Disney). Thad on the other hand, loves to be scared. I decided to be nice the other day and agreed to watch a scary movie with him. He waited until it was totally dark outside and turned off all the lights so we could watch The Conjuring, holy freaking balls that movie is scary. For me, the scariest kind of movies are the ones that are based on a true story and/or demon possession, spoiler alert, this movie is terrifying. To make the whole movie watching experience even worse we were streaming the movie and it decided to freeze during a super scary scene so the TV was frozen and I screamed like a little girl.

Perhaps because I was subject to a scary part of Halloween I decided to do a manicure that is pretty much the opposite of scary.  For this manicure I used China Glaze Riveting, Orly White Tips, and Ulta Sun-Sational. I wasn’t a huge fan of these nails but I got so many compliments on them that I’ve started to like them more.

Candy Corn nails

I decided to sponge on the colors instead of doing color blocking, I like that they aren’t so harsh like they would be if I did the hard lines but that you can still totally tell what it is supposed to be. If I did them again I would leave more white at the top so the colors were move even, my pinkie barely has any white left on it. Doing these reminded me of my pride nails and my butterfly nails, I need to do more gradients, they are just pretty.

I look like I have very wrinkly fingers

After my last two fairly low key Halloween designs I’m thinking I need to go out with a bang for my actual Halloween nails. Since Mom’s birthday is on Halloween you may have to wait till November first to see them, but if they turn out anywhere near as cool as they look in my head they will be worth the wait

Party nails

My birthday is tomorrow!! I have already had such a fun weekend and my birthday hasn’t even happened yet J On Saturday I had a birthday party, this was only the second birthday party I have ever had, so needless to say I was pretty excited about it. Thad decorated our yard and it looked so cute, he also got me a taco bar and it was amazing. We have a bunch of tacos and beer leftover from the party but I’m pretty sure those are the best leftovers ever. Thank you to everyone who put up with my drunk ass at my dirty thirty J

These were my party nails (not to be confused with my birthday nails which I’m painting later tonight). I loved the design I had with my striper overload nails so much I decided to recreate it with different colors. For this manicure I used Ulta Oh!, Sally Girl Matte Top Coat, and a ton of stripers.

Party nails!

I can’t even begin to say how much I love the matte top coat on the orange, it looks so frosted and smooth in person, I just love it. I think these nails look like feathers even more so than the first time I did the design, I can’t decide which ones I like more but I do know that I really dig these nails.

These nails say “I came to consume tacos and beer”

My co workers spoiled me for two straight weeks with birthday surprises and the matte top coat was one of them (who nice are they?). I got to say, I actually like the Sally Girl matte top coat over essie, crazy right? My essie is super thick and leaves white dots on everything but this top coat went on really smooth and didn’t leave any streak lines like the essie does. It takes longer for the matte finish to happen but overall I really liked the polish.

 

Love these nails

I was so happy with how these nails turned out and they worked great for a taco themed party J. I’m going to have to go through all my stripers and see what other color combos I can come up with, this design is just too much fun to only do twice J

Rubber Duckie nails

When I moved into my first apartment I really wanted to have a rubber duckie bathroom, nothing says independent adult like a bathroom fully of yellow ducks. I got rubber duckie everything, shower curtain, trash can, soap dispenser, even wall art, that bathroom was so full of ducks you couldn’t walk into it without having hundreds of beady black duck eyes watching your every move. I feel like I’m somehow making my bathroom sound sinister but it was quite cute actually. I finally ditched the ducks when I moved into my house, although I do still have bride and groom ducks hidden in the closet.

I would say I did these nails to celebrate my duck bathroom of apartments past, but I really just did them because they were cute. J For this manicure I used China Glaze For Audrey and Sea Spray, Orly Skinny Dip and Liquid Vinyl, OPI Alpine Snow, Ulta Sun-Sational, and Sally Hansen Strobe Light. I’m very happy with how these nails turned out, I especially like the marbleized soap bubbles.  

Rubber Duckie nails

To do the bubbles I dipped my dotter in three different colors, the dotter made the color mix in some places but also have separate colors in one dot. This is similar to the technique used in water color nails and it really makes me want to try that (what don’t I want to try though?). I was surprised with how easy the ducks were to do, the ducks on my right hand aren’t bad but the left ring finger duck is definitely the best one.

Rubber Duckie you’re the one

These nails were really fun to do and they didn’t take long at all, start to finish I had these done in less than an hour (which is pretty good for me). They do cause me to sing the rubber duckie song from Sesame Street but that is a price I’m willing to pay J

Butterfly nails

I’ve had the theme song from Reading Rainbow stuck in my head for the last three days because of my nails. I’m a truly terrible singer so it is really bad when I have a song I love stuck in my head because I want to sing it and my singing causes inner ear bleeding. I was shocked to find that a large number of my co –workers didn’t know the song from Reading Rainbow, it was such a huge part of my childhood I can’t believe that anyone close to my age wouldn’t have also loved that amazing show. Butterfly in the sky. . . ahhhh memories.

For these nails I used Orly Prelude to a Kiss and Liquid Vinyl, Ulta Sun-Sational, OPI Alpine Snow, and China Glaze Riveting. These nails were a pain in the butt to do, they took for freaking forever, and I’m not super pleased with how my line work turned out.

Butterfly nails

Although they are far from perfect, they are pretty cool. They look much better from further away (something I say about every manicure that uses sponging). I was so excited to start them that I sponged my thumb before I put on my base color which is why it is much lighter than the other nails. I would have taken it off and started over but instead I was too lazy, I can justify it though by saying that I wanted you to be able to see what it looks like without a nude base color.

I can fly twice as high. . .

I really liked how the gradient turned out on these; I did the same colors in gradient for my pride nails so I knew I liked them together ahead of time. The glitter in the orange is just downright fun and it works so nice with the bright yellow.

Just take a look . . .

I wonder if Reading Rainbow is on Netflix, I bet it is like Milo and Otis though and it will lose it magic now that I’m an adult. Hope you like my butterflies J

Neon Water Marble nails

Like most rational humans, I hate going to the doctor (any doctor) but sometimes you just can’t avoid it and you have to go. In the last few weeks I’ve had to endure the dentist and the eye doctor. Going to the dentist is one of my least favorite things, no, that’s too nice let me try again. Going to the dentist sucks and I hate it with the red hot fiery passion of a thousand Thursdays. This last time I went they decided that instead of using the evil pick thing to clean my teeth they would use high powered water, this sounds good in theory since it went way faster and didn’t make the horrible scratchy sound, but in practice it just misted my entire face with a stank fog of crusty tooth shrapnel, joy. The eye doctor went better than the dentist, I just got my eyes dilated so I looked like a space alien, I looked terrifying but it was pretty funny.

I debated whether or not to post these nails, I think they are an epic fail but other people seemed to like them so I guess they are worth a post. For this manicure I used OPI Alpine Snow, China Glaze Splish Splash, Turned up Turquoise, and Pool Party, essie Braziliant, Sally Hansen CSM Anenome of Mine, Ulta Sun-Sational, and e.l.f 2F01AS.

Neon Water Marble nails

These were another by request manicure. My boss suggested that I try a neon water marble and I thought it had been a while since I tried water marbling and I should give it another go. I made a few mistakes with this manicure, one is that I painted them on a white base (neon usually looks so good on a white base!) the white just ended up making some of the colors lighter and that totally threw off the whole neon look. If I did this again I would paint them with one of the neons and then do fewer total colors as part of the water marbling, I think I used too many colors of polish and they ended up getting a bit muddled.

They look like I just threw paint on my nails

As with any water marble, these nails were super messy and took forever. I just don’t think they look cool enough for the amount of work that goes into them. I put glitter on my pointer finger hoping that the glitter would help the overall look, it didn’t. Oh well, I can’t love them all J

Pride nails :)

I hope everyone had a great Mother’s Day yesterday! I was able to spend the day with my mom (shocking) and we had a blast. My mom is fun to hang out with in general and by adding drinking into the equation it only gets more fun! I was a little nervous though because Mom wanted me to help with gardening and I had just done my nails that morning, I powered through though like a good daughter. J We even managed to find time for me to paint Mom’s nails!

Happy Mother’s Day Mom!

I try not to be too political, despite the fact that I’m super loud and talk pretty much consistently I tend to shy away from talking about politically charged subjects. I just hate it so much when you find out someone you thought was cool is actually a total douche. That being said, when I did these nails I didn’t intend for them to be political at all, I actually did these nails at my Dad’s suggestion. Regardless of why I did them though, I do want to say that they are very fitting for such an awesome day - Minnesota voted for marriage equality today and I think that is pretty rad. For this manicure I used Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up and Anenome of Mine, China Glaze Riveting, Splish Splash, and Paper Chasing, Orly Prelude to a Kiss, and Ulta Sun-Sational.

My unintentional pride nails

I really like how these nails turned out, they were a huge pain in the ass so I’m happy that the end result is so much fun. To create this look I painted a base coat of the Orly and then sponged on the colors in rainbow order. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I had to write down the order so I didn’t have to say ROYGBIV over and over again.

I love that I have a big white dog hair next to my middle finger, I’m classy

These nails are the type that look way better from far away than they do up close. I think that is common with sponge painted nails, or maybe I’m just saying that because I jacked up my cuticles and I don’t want you to notice. I hope you like my pride nails as much as I do J

essie - Braziliant

I can’t call my nails short anymore. I had to buy new files so I could shorten them, they still aren’t as long as they were before the incident, but I think I might like them more now, they are a good length. Just because they grew out doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing ridiculous tacky manicures on them. I keep wanting to do nice simple nails, and then as soon as I sit down to paint I just go crazy. If I’m not distracted by my nails I feel like I didn’t really do my job.

A few months ago one of my friends gave me a color that screamed summer, I’ve been waiting to use it until it got warmer, but after how this spring has been going I decided to just cave and use it despite the cold weather. For this manicure I used essie Braziliant, Orly Prelude to a Kiss, OPI Brisbane Bronze, Sally Hansen CSM Parrot, and Ulta Oh!.

essie Braziliant

I love the base color in this manicure; Braziliant was exactly what I wanted it to be. I sometimes forget how good the formula on essie can be since I don’t own very much of it. The lighter colors seem to be runnier, but this color had the perfect formula, and looked amazing after two coats. I’m not sure what the green blob things were supposed to be, when I started painting my nails I wanted to do a pattern that wasn’t flowers but then they ended up looking like blob flowers.

Are they flowers or amoebas?

On my ring finger I used lose glitter and it looked pretty cool, in a 3D kind of way. The glitter didn’t wear well at all though and most of that glitter is now in my bed and hair. My favorite part of this manicure is the little Orly colored dots. They make the whole manicure look kind of retro, like a kitchen from the 70s.

My ring finger looks fuzzy

You can tell by looking at these nails that I didn’t really have a plan when I started. I love the color combination but the overall design isn’t one of my favorites. Pretty sure these aren’t going to last long, but that’s ok, I like painting my nails J