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

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

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

Zoya Nightmare nails

I’m a sucker for a good deal, even when the deal ends up not being so good. My mom and I like to compare our shopping hauls to big game, for instance if we got $300 worth of stuff at Khol’s for $20 we may say that we got a moose. In case you are wondering right now if the poor sales person looks confused by our exchange the answer is yes. When I’m shopping by myself I tend to fall victim to fake good deals more often, I guess protecting me from myself is one of my mom’s many jobs (thanks mom). I fell victim to one of these deals at Ulta the last time I went a little crazy there, they had a deal with Zoya polish that if you bought three at full price then you got a free ‘color lock kit’. For some reason I just had to have that kit, it was an all consuming need that could only be satisfied by obtaining that ‘free’ kit. In the end I left Ulta with three Zoya colors, one of which is a dupe of Deutsch You Want Me Baby?, and only one did I really want, sigh.

I was really excited to do this manicure because I used my brand new ‘color lock kit’, unfortunately the kit ended up being a huge disappointment. The kit has a really good polish remover, a basic base coat, a worthless top coat, and a serum that you are supposed to use an eye dropper thing to put drops of it over the worthless top coat. I’m not sure if my top coat is just messed up or if the top coat is really this worthless. It is so crazy thick that it was impossible to put it on and not have bubbles everywhere (you will see the bubbles shortly), I put the serum on top but that only seemed to anger it more. I went from being super excited about this design and manicure in general, to totally disillusioned. For this manicure I used a horrible ‘color lock kit’, Zoya Channing, Maria Luisa, and Louise.

I’m not going to even pretend this isn’t a nightmare of a manicure

So this manicure had a lot going wrong, although the base color was a very pretty brown (it’s Louise) it was much too dark for the design I put on it so the branches and leaves just look like a hot mess. The bubbles are horrible (that top coat should be ashamed of itself) and they make the whole manicure look lumpy.

These lasted like two days tops

All the colors were actually pretty (and super shiny, you can see the reflection of my camera in my nails) but they just didn’t work together the way I wanted them to. I love the colors Zoya has but the formula isn’t my favorite, they seem to stain my nails more than other brands and some of them are super runny. I really need to try leaves again and redeem myself for these.

Peacock Feather nails

I had ever intention to blog the other night but my DVR had other plans. Without me knowing, my beautiful DVR quietly recorded three episodes of I Used to be Fat, don’t worry, I feel the appropriate amount of shame for being excited about a show on MTV. I love bad TV and this show is right up my alley, if you are unfamiliar with the show, it is about teens during the summer between high school and college. For the most part they have always been fat and this is their one chance to not be fat when they go off to college, I get way too into this show. I find myself cheering them on and when they try to give up I yell at them for squandering this amazing opportunity. So, yeah, basically what I’m saying is I watched three straight hours of a teenage-weight-loss-docudrama; I’m a very exciting lady.

My plan was for these nails to look like peacock nails, and I feel like I should mention that they looked way more like feathers in person than in pictures. For this manicure I used China Glaze Splish Splash and Turned up Turquoise, Sally Hansen CSM Gilty Pleasure, and Zoya Ray. Overall I think these turned out ok, but they certainly are far from my favorite.

Peacock Feather nails

I almost feel like the dark green was too shiny and that’s why the pictures didn’t turn out right, it’s super dark and shiny in person. This design would be way better on shorter nails and if I would have added a purple to it.

More exciting than peahen nails

I think it’s kinda funny that I don’t really like birds but I love bird motifs. I guess I think their looks are the best part of them. As soon as I painted these I wanted to repaint, it was only sheer laziness that caused them to not be changed immediately. Oh well, can’t win them all J

Firework nails

I knew before the fourth of July that Millie was scared of fireworks; I didn’t truly appreciate how scared she was though. The evening of the fourth was easily the hardest night I have ever had; I think that I got a small taste of what it is like to be a parent of an infant. Millie was beside herself with fear from the fireworks; she kept pacing and drooling like one of those sad polar bears at the zoo. At about midnight I went to Wall-Greens to get some Benadryl, after checking the interwebs to make sure she could have some but the drugs did nothing to stop her pacing. In total, I got a little less than three hours of sleep that night, stupid fireworks at four am. The next day at work I was straight up stupid, I’m not saying that normally I’m a Rhodes Scholar, but I was dumb on Friday. To give you an example, I accidently dumped half a box of Cheerios on the floor because I didn’t realize the box was upside down.  

Despite how horrible fireworks make my home, I actually really like fireworks (as long as they are not shot off after 2am when I have to work the next day). For this manicure I used Sally Hansen CSM All Fired Up, Zoya Nidhi, and OPI Alpine Snow. I also used stripers in white, blue, silver glitter, and blue glitter. These nails were really fun to do; the fireworks were made up of just a bunch of layered lines so you don’t have to worry about being super precise.

Firework nails

I don’t use the Zoya very much because the color is very thin and transparent, it worked great on top of the other red though to make it a nice glittery red. The red totally stained my nails even though I used two base coats, red can be tricky like that. The red was also pretty hard to clean off my fingers, I’m a messy painter and I always clean up my nails in the shower the next day, it took two showers to get these cleaned up enough.

Ugh, these totally got Katy Perry in my head

I have a bit of a hangnail by my pointer finger right now, it annoys me so much but I need to be an adult and not fuss with it and make it worse. At least these fireworks didn’t scare Millie like the real ones did J. I hope you had an awesome fourth and happy Ringo Starr’s birthday!!!

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