On the Hunt

Hop to it, friends, those chocolate eggs aren’t going to find themselves!  Wishing you all a nice end to your Easter weekends.  Mine is closing out with a big dinner at my mom and dad’s.  My mom’s an excellent cook, with a particular emphasis on blow-out holiday meals, so this should be fun!  Watch this space later for any updates I can manage on my turkey and roast potatoes and GRAVY coma. 😉

But talk of chocolate and holiday feasts aside, if you’re trying to hunt up this festive nail look for yourself, I regret to inform you that this is one of those deeply aggravating posts where I used two polishes (heck, potentially two brands) no longer in existence, Candy Lacquer’s Ring Pops glitter topper over Smitten Polish’s Not Your Mama’s Easter Grass (then whose Easter grass is it precisely?)  I believe Smitten operates under the name Dreamland these days and I’m really not sure of Candy Lacquer’s status.  But both of these polishes, despite being years old, are still trucking along just fine, and so I put them to good use in this very Springy manicure that looks like a macro shot of the inside of an Easter basket filled with sweet treats.

Fairyland

Well, here’s another polish pick from the wayback machine, Candy Lacquer’s pastel rainbow unicorn glitter, Fairyland.  Along with Licorice Allsorts, the chunky matte glitter I featured in a pretty manicure the other day, Fairyland is the first indie polish I ever purchased.  Fairyland, a wild mix of every kind of holographic glitter you could imagine (hexes, circles, tiny squares, gigantic squares, moons, stars, diamonds and hearts) is holding up ever so slightly less well than Licorice Allsorts.  Some of the colour in the glitter has begun leeching into the base, lending Fairyland a pale green kind of tinge.  This is quite common with holographic glitters – after four or so years, they begin to lose their colourfastness.  This is a little unfortunate in that it limits its use somewhat to blue and green-hued polishes, but I actually think it looks best over blues, greens and blue-greens anyways, so that’s alright with me.  It’s just such a gorgeous polish, and I was simply in the mood for flashy unicorn disco nails.  Must be a day ending in Y.

Sweet and Speckled

The weather’s all snowy, cruddy and overcast today, and as I sat down at my work area with my polishes, I thought, “I absolutely do not want to do some super complicated design, just something bright and cheerful that makes me happy.”  So I pulled out this polish, Candy Lacquer’s Licorice Allsorts, which I nearly always pair with cool-toned pinks, because it’s gorgeous that way.  Licorice Allsorts is actually the first indie polish I ever bought, yikes, five years ago now?  That this polish is five years old is actually pretty amazing; it has held up incredibly well.  And it’s just so much fun, with that weird, mixed candy-hued assortment of glitter in hot pink, baby pink, marigold, black, yellow, white, mint green, darker mint green and probably a couple of others that I’m missing right now.

And I’ve always loved the look of these large, extra chunky glitter polishes after they’ve been topped with a smoothing layer of matte topcoat, here OPI’s Matte Topcoat (bit of a redundant name, that.)  Et voila, throwback candy shop nails that are definitely making me happy – cruddy day mission accomplished. 🙂

Butterfly Candy

Squeezing some of my sunniest polishes into the final few days of summer with this pretty swatch of Candy Lacquer’s Butterfly Candy, a favourite rainbow glitter bomb speckled with a kaleidoscope of butterflies (fun science-y tidbit: that is the actual technical term for a grouping of butterflies, a kaleidoscope.  So beautifully fitting!)

Burger Buddies

Here’s a couple of adorable little burger charms nestled on a bed of condiment-hued colours and, if you ask me, some very suspicious-looking relish (Candy Lacquer’s Candy Cane Fiesta.)  Beware glittery foodstuffs, friends – dancing with that particular devil never ended well for anyone. 😉

Bow-verkill (31DC2016)

A baby pink base, tons of super vibrant glitter (Candy Lacquer’s Licorice Allsorts) and two hot pink, rhinestone-studded, hard plastic bows combine to create a whole lot of look for day 17’s theme of glitter in the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge.  Nail art embellishments are never anything but a pain in the arse to maintain over the long term, but oh my, are these sorts of manicures ever a delight in the short term (so long as the short term doesn’t involve anything strenuous or water-based or – lord help your hands – strenuous AND water-based.  So no crazy bow manicures for Michael Phelps.  But you know Ryan Lochte would be down.) 😉

Summer Popsicles

Well, we’re right in the mix of this summer business now, aren’t we?  It was a muggy one today, with more of the same supposedly on tap for tomorrow, and just in time for Canada Day.  Ah, but it wouldn’t be any sort of decent Canada Day if you weren’t sweating your bollocks off at either a cottage or on Parliament Hill with about 300,000 of your dearest and drunkest friends.  I will be eschewing all of the above because I am a Canada Day buzzkill – years of just not good times, starting all the way back in high school, have led to me kind of going into hiding on July 1st.  I’m happiest at home, listening to Sloan, watching the Trailer Park Boys, working on my Tim Hortons’ nails.

Speaking of, here’s some nails!  Regrettably not of Timbits (crack-laced donut holes; kidding about the crack part, although Timmy’s fans are kind of rabid about their double-doubles and cherry chips) or anything at all having to do with Canada Day, but I got the summer part in, using Candy Lacquer’s Melting Popsicles glitter topper over a pale blue creme for a pretty, warm weather look that’s at least thematically appropriate for the sweltering summer temperatures.  Might even work for Canada Day itself, were it not for the fact that I’m duty bound by our Constitution to paint red maple leafs on my nails come July 1st.  See you with those tomorrow!

 

Eye-Searing Citrus

Bright!  So bright!  Just a simple, super vibrant combo here of a couple of unnamed neon jellies topped with Candy Lacquer’s ultra fruity Citrus Smoothie glitter topper.  In real life, this manicure is a touch more yellow and a smidge more pink than it’s showing in these photos – with apologies, neons can do some very strange things to a camera’s colour correctness.

Too Much?

Well, this is just a whole load of manicure!  But I do love the ultra vibrant combination of Candy Lacquer’s Ring Pops glitter topper over Ceramic Glaze’s shimmery turquoise Mermaid’s Tale.  I’m also so over THE RETURN OF WINTER (at half measure, true, but with the end thisclose and just in sight, today’s snow and freezing rain feels like a big setback) and this is my way of rebelling.  TAKE THAT, idiot winter!  Feel my well-manicured wrath and TREMBLE!!!  Or just continue pissing icy, sleet-y, dangerous-to-drive-in stuff all over my city this Easter weekend.  I guess that works, too.

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.