New Years Eve Glitz

Happy New Years Eve, fellow bloggers and nail art aficionados! Wherever you hang your party hat tonight, may you stay safe, revel responsibly and copy these nails for yourself – you’ll be the glitteriest girl at the party!

To get this look, I layered one generous coat of rainbow holographic glitter, Ozotic’s 528, over top of one coat of basic black, China Glaze’s Liquid Leather. Then I created a glitter “gradient” by applying a glitter topper, OPI’s Polka.Com, just to the tips of my nails, spreading it upwards towards my cuticles ever so slightly for that gradual gradient look.

Up, No Strings Attached

This manicure started in one place and wound up in another entirely. Or I should say it started in no place, as I had no plans for anything other than the colour palette – neons – and my desire to do as much as I could with nothing more than a double-ended dotting tool.

Five fingers’ worth of eye-searing neon dots later I took a step back, regarded my efforts and concluded that I had rather unknowingly recreated the balloon design from the Disney Pixar movie Up…just without the strings! There’s undoubtedly a lesson to be learned here about not tethering yourself to one artistic vision, of learning to spread your wings and fly, so high, or some such treacly nonsense, but I’ll simply remain content with having created a really cute manicure, even if it was nearly totally accidental! 🙂

Watermeloncholia

It seems a tad too early into the not-quite-new year for me to be experiencing my annual bout of Too Much Winteritis, but judging from the fact that my last six manicures have been bright, springy and glittery, I’d say I’m right in the throes of SAD, or as some of us here in eastern Ontario occasionally call it, Suck Ass Disorder. As in this weather sucks ass, time to bring on the warm(er.)

Here I revisited another favourite design, the watermelon, giving it a little gradient twist. And feeling the need to use two Candy Lacquer polishes in one evening, I added a couple of accent nails in a mouthwatering melon shade topped with Licorice Allsorts, a fun matte glitter topper I’ve gone back to time and time again.

Gone Dotty

A simple dotted manicure featuring two of my favourites, Essence polishes, a fantastic, inexpensive drugstore line, and Candy Lacquer’s Fairyland glitter topper, which I once described in a previous post as Lucky Charms in a bottle. Put the two together and you’ve got one manicure custom made for yours truly!

Sushi For Me

Never content to leave well enough alone, here I painted some tiny toros and tamagos over top of a bubbly looking jelly sandwich manicure. Me? I’m all about the tempura shrimp roll, and white tuna belly is divine, but neither one’s particularly fun to capture in formaldehyde form! 😉

Sheeps

The name of any animal, the plural of which is also the singular, is automatically made 59.7 percent funnier with the addition of the letter S. Sheeps. Mooses. Deers and mouses. Mices? Meeses? See, funny!

Here I revisited an early design, some blank-eyed sheep standing on a glittering, grassy knoll. The little guy on my thumb is dancing up a storm, boogieing to the tune of individuality (and Tom Jones, I think,) kicking up little bits of grass as he goes. What? Tell me I’m not the only one who makes up back stories for her nail art. Right? Hello? *crickets*

Raspberry White Chocolate Swirl

A beautiful, but temperamental, raspberry-hued polish topped with one of my favourite nail art designs, the spiral. I’m lousy at tribal designs and geometrics aren’t really my thing, but give me a clean, rounded edge and I’m off to the races. I’m like the Frank Gehry of nail art. Here I used OPI’s My Vampire is Buff over top of A England’s Rose Bower, a gorgeous but difficult to wrangle holographic polish the exact rich raspberry shade of a rose blossom.

I’ll note that after I took these photos, I went over the swirls with a textured glitter polish, Zoya’s Godiva, thinking it’d add some great visual interest and a little subtle sparkle. What actually happened was the slight grey tint of the sparkles clashed with the slight cream tint of the swirls, creating an unholy, almost greasy-looking effect that led me to angrily exclaim to my husband, “God, it just looks like someone sneezed on them!” And that’s a reaction you NEVER want to have to your nail art!

Sexy Like a Chocolate Strawberry

I did this design months ago when my nails were both longer (subjective, I realize, when your nails are as short as mine) and I was apparently enamoured with super high gloss jelly polishes. Geez Louise, these things are practically blinding! I’ve always been a sucker for fruit-based designs (my first and second attempts at nail art were watermelons and indeed, strawberries) so it seemed like a done deal to “dip” a favourite fruit design in some juicy jelly polish to create little lacquered chocolate-dipped strawberries.

Shiny

Well, there’s one way to stress your already taxed-to-the-max iPhotography skills – simply add a shiny glitter, OPI’s Polka.Com, to a shimmery baby pink, OPI’s Princesses Rule!, and watch your camera struggle to both colour-match AND focus!

Sketchy photography skills aside (New Years resolution number one…) this is a fun colour combination that reminds me of mylar balloons at a birthday party.

Graffiti Sweetie

These nails, a bright-on-bright gradient topped with a neon blue matte glitter topper, look a bit like they’ve been spattered with paint. It’s a cool effect without having to do a darn thing other than swipe on a polish, in this case Sephora’s Formula X in TNT.