Lovely Lavender

It is an absolutely bee-youtiful day in the neighbourhood, complete with sunny skies, melting snow, birds a-tweeting and, to my never-ending delight, a neighbour out walking her two fat cats on the path that runs alongside my building.  And I don’t know about you, but I think beautiful days call for beautiful nails, especially ones that evoke all things warm and springy.

Here we have another manicure inspired by a Demeter perfume, this time the sweet and simple fragrance of herbal lavender.  I think perhaps the background polish I chose for these nails, A England’s Wuthering Heights, is a tad too dark to really let the delicate little lavender blossoms shine – these nails ultimately remind me of a pair of flannel pyjamas I used to own!  Still fitting, though, given the whole lavender-sleep connection.

These Nails Are Bow Pretty!

Here’s a sweet sparkler for your Saturday evening, a delicate – yet glitzy – manicure featuring KB Shimmer’s To Peach His Own adorned with a little crystal-studded bow from Daily Charme.  Bow pretty!

Night Blooming Jasmine

All will become clear in a few day’s time when I’ve completed the entire post, but these pretty floral nails featuring the delicate white blossoms of a night blooming jasmine were inspired by this bottle of jasmine-scented cologne I was sent from Demeter to tinker around with and report back on.  Tinker and report, I shall, but for now I just wanted to create some simple nail art showcasing these pretty little night owl flowers.

As a related aside, did you know that jasmine is a relative of nightshade?  It’s a whole plant family with dark reputations!  Kind of like the Malfoys and some of the female members of the Black family from Harry Potter if they photosynthesized.

The Lost Boys

Despite the fact that I have referenced it approximately 6,573 times over two years on this very blog, this is the first Lost Boys manicure to grace my fingertips.  I think that prior to this I had performance anxiety – what if my skills (nail art skills, you perverts) weren’t enough to honour my favourite movie of all time (a tie with Beetlejuice, actually, but my nostalgic point remains!)  But I’ve been feeling more confident about my nail art as of late, and so it felt like time to bust out some seriously small lettering and fussy shading. And I may have been watching it this afternoon, also for about the 6,573rd time.  Judge me not, judgers – I know you’ve got that movie (or movies, plural) that you watch over and over and over again because Corey Haim was the cutest thing ever and you wish you had Starr’s wardrobe and a dirty biker boyfriend with a scary supernatural affliction.  No, just me? 😉

Polka Hots

This dotted manicure doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but sometimes you just want some classic polka dots.  The slightly unusual colour combination adds a little something special, too, taking this nail art straight from dot to hot.

I Defy You, Winter!

This is about the time every year when I start to feel a bit pooched with the whole winter thing, a feat in itself this year given that winter didn’t even really begin in earnest until the first week of January.  Everything’s just so ugly and grey and tired.  Winter kinda sucks.

But you know what doesn’t suck?  This manicure!  Which is obviously a neon confetti-sprinkled reaction to all the cold, grumpy and overcast, and a welcome nail art distraction from all of the above.  Here I used another Candy Lacquer glitter polish, Beach Blanket, over Bonita’s Splendid Love, a pale, pink-tinged lilac.

Trevor Takes a Bath

Trevor the Pudgicorn has returned for his second appearance on my nails, this time hoofing back in a nice, hot bubble bath with his namesake bath product, a Unicorn Horn bubble bar from Lush!  Trevor’s got mad horn envy, although I can’t fault the guy – seriously, how adorable is this handmade, mica-dusted cutie?

Released as part of Lush’s Valentine’s Day collection, this limited edition, lightly lavender-scented bubble bar retails for $7.95 Canadian (so with our dollar completely in the frozen-over toilet, that means it’ll practically be free for you American Lushies.) 😉

And how does one use this mythical creature?  Well, some people just take the entire Horn and toss it into their tub, pulling it out when they’ve reached their desired bubble level. I find that completely submerging a bubble bar tends to do pretty funky things to its consistency, however, and so I choose to do what lots of people do come bath time, and that’s lop off a small chunk and run it through a strainer held under the tap. This method also weeds out any of those extraneous chunky bits that Lush is so famous for sneaking into their products (although this year’s version of the Unicorn Horn is blessedly free from candy and sparkle-type embellishments.)

Trevor likes it!

I’m Melting!

Well, my nails are.  Or more accurately, they’re wearing an entirely un-wintery combination of two of my favourite polishes, KB Shimmer’s navy blue Soul Deep and Candy Lacquer’s Melting Popsicles.  And while we might be a long ways off from either melt or popsicle season, this perfectly purple glitter topper (with hints of hot pink, neon orange, turquoise and lime green) is too pretty to hide away until the snow is gone. Besides, based on the absolutely bonkers storm that bore down on the east coast of the United States this weekend, that could be a very long time.  As the Canadian who’s usually on the flip side of the crap weather equation, I sympathize, American friends.  Stay warm, and may your nails stay pretty.

A Delicate Design

As advertised, here is a delicately dotted floral design, the kind of manicure I was going for the other day when I whiffed it big time and wound up recreating the fug print on my grandmother’s even fuggier couch.   S-U-C-C-E-S-S, that is how we spell SUCCESS, am I right?!  Ahh, much better.  Delicate, dainty and pretty. 🙂

I *Heart* You

And I heart this manicure, too! Like stars, hearts are one of those things I don’t free-hand particularly well. But I am powerless to resist a pink, red and white colour combination (here a pond manicure using Nfu Oh’s cerise-hued jelly, JS24) which always calls to mind very Valentiney things, hearts included. So I went all-in, painted on an allover heart design, and in the end I think things turned out quite well. My husband said they look like nail decals (well, he said “decnals” in the vein of the Trailer Park Boys’ Ricky, a man who mangles the English language with tremendous flair) which is just about the best compliment I can think of. 🙂