A Speckled Egg of a Different Sort

Yeah, you don’t see them in electric cobalt blue all that often, do you?  I certainly can’t deny that the overall look of this manicure – Ardene’s black-and-blue glitter topper, Following, over Nails Inc.’s blue creme, Baker Street – is Easter Egg ramped all the way up to 11, first with a glossy topcoat, and then dialed back a bit with the addition of a matte topcoat, Zoya’s Matte Velvet, to highlight all that nearly-hidden blue glitter (matte topcoats, as always, also destroy your manicure; I’ve yet to encounter one, no matter the brand, formulation, age, etc., that doesn’t deposit white fleckies all over your hard work. It’s a cool look, but regrettably also a destructive one.)

Put My Thing Down, Flip It and Reverse It

Earlier in the week I posted a manicure featuring a golden gradient over a denim blue base.  It was an elegant and somehow understated look, and a welcome change from my usual “all the all” approach to nail art.

So OF COURSE I couldn’t let that stand, choosing instead to flip things around and go for the glitter, this time topping a megawatt golden sparkler, Orly’s Bling, with a blue (and black) matte glitter, Ardene’s Photobomb. Pretty.  Sometimes it pays to mix it up, but it also always feels great to come home, does it not?

Happy Hanukkah!

Wishing all my Jewish friends a wonderful start to the Hanukkah season. To celebrate the occasion, here’s an elegant, yet festive, manicure. Practically bubbie-approved, and super easy, to boot – just a top-down glitter gradient (Ardene’s Golden Child glitter topper) over a dark and stormy blue creme (KB Shimmer’s Stonewashed.)  May your celebrations be happy ones, friends. 🙂

 

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night!

I’m a smidge young for that to be a Bay City Rollers reference, but the following statement might date me just as well: I know – and love – a version of the Suh–Suh-Suh-Saturday Night song by a Scottish band I adored in high school called Ned’s Atomic Dustbin off the soundtrack for the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer (phew, that took a minute to come full circle there, no?) Oh, Ned’s – haven’t thought about them in a while! Alternative music-loving kids of the ’90s may remember them as the exceptionally be-coiffed Scottish band with two bassists who did the Kill Your Television song. Or not, because I’m not sure how popular they were on this side of the pond. But their music was a kind of weird and clunky rock-pop that I was powerless to resist in the ’90s, to say nothing of the fact that they were super cute, although there was hardly a band in the ’90s that I didn’t find completely adorable, because dirty musicians with long hair were completely my catnip back then…annnnnnnddddd I may just have wandered off on a bit of a tangent there!

Okay, so to bring this back to the nails, it’s S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night! and I just wanted to do a simple manicure that was fun, summery and maybe very similar in design and colour palette to a pink-base-and-blue-glitter mani that I did last week? Yeah, I’d say they’re definitely in the same family. Second cousins, if you will. For this mani, I used three coats of Mentality Nail Polish’s coral glaze under one coat of a blue and black glitter from Ardene called Photobomb. And if you’re thinking that this is not the first time you’ve seen this coral glaze in one of my manis before, that’s because it is. I use this particular polish all the time in nail art and as a base for more intricate designs, although I use all of the polishes from Mentality’s Glazing Art Set every week, because they’re awesome. Simple as that!

Everything is Awesome!

Lego Movie nails inspired by a recent rash of Lego-related activities (watching the movie itself, playing the super fun tie-in video game, having that song stuck in my head for 18 hours out of the day) and a couple of random polishes my mom got me for Christmas, including Pure Ice’s Show Stopper, a perfectly hued Lego yellow creme, and Ardene’s Photobomb, a black and neon blue matte glitter topper. Those two polishes alone remind me so much of the character of Wyldstyle there on my middle finger (how appropriate; I think she’d approve!) that it wasn’t much of a leap to Lego Movie nails featuring everybody’s favourite maybe-DJ and her partner in crime, Emmett. Sing it with me now: These nails are so awesome!

Gilded Raspberry-Chocolate

This manicure, which by the title of this post alone you should be able to guess reminds me of gold-flecked, raspberry cream truffles (when does a manicure not remind me of food?), started out life as a ruffian, a type of mani in which you polish over a rounded strip directly in the middle of your nails, leaving a half moon of base polish up by your cuticles that stretches down both sides of your nails. Sounds complicated, but it’s really not – just imagine your nails sporting one of those ridiculous mustaches that drop straight down off a man’s face and that’s a ruffian.

But over the course of ruffianing it up, I got a little overzealous and accidentally lacquered over the elongated sides (which had nothing to do with the fact that I really hate those mustaches and everything to do with my willy nilly approach to polish application), turning my wee chocolate-raspberry ruffian into a proper reverse French manicure, which, given that it was a giant mistake in the first place, seemed as good a place to stop as any.

Here I topped Smitten Polish’s dark brown holo, Seasonal Lattes, with A England’s raspberry red holo, Rose Bower, and then added a smattering of gold glitter, Ardene’s Golden Child, because no nummy truffle is complete without at least a sprinkling of luxurious golden flakes.