Because every end-of-the-week should start with cake, should it not? Even if it’s of the totally inedible and wildly impractical (ugh, those little Fimo berries) lacquered variety. Also, this is my second cake-inspired manicure in the last five days – think I should add something sweet to my weekend shopping list? 😉
I joked yesterday that after doing two back-to-back manis inspired by alcoholic drinks (Tuesday’s frozen strawberry daiquiri nail art and Wednesday’s cherry-garnished Manhattan mani) it was clearly cocktail hour here at Finger Candy HQ. Now that I’ve done another – these citrusy blue curacao nails – I’m just running with it. Cocktails are a surprisingly fantastic inspiration for nail art; there’s actually quite a bit to draw from there. For these nails I layered blue and turquoise jelly polishes one atop the other, and then added a sweet, fruity garnish.
Wanna hear a story about blue curacao? Growing up as a teenager in Ottawa, Ontario, THE thing to do once you turned 18 (or earlier if you had the borrowed ID of an older friend or sibling) was nip across the river to Hull, Quebec to take advantage of their lower legal drinking age. And THE place to do that was The Strip, a three or four-block stretch of bars and restaurants and dance clubs and resto-pubs that was pretty well overrun with drunk and horny teenagers every Friday and Saturday night. With my birthday coming toward the end of the school year, I was one of the last of my friends to make the journey across the bridge. Also because I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to go; The Strip had some very nice establishments – Chez Henri looked like a Victorian castle, and Campus was a hole, albeit a hole with fantastic music – but it also had a (deserved) reputation for being rough, a $2.50 cocktail-fueled debauchfest that spilled out into the streets every weekend, bringing with it fights and altercations and just generally crap behaviour. But I suspect that’s just what happens when you get a whole bunch of drunk and horny teenagers together in one place.
So I had my reservations. As did my parents, who never, ever prevented me from joining in on the reindeer games, although they did have some concerns. And so one day after school a trusted friend swung by my house to talk to my folks and put their minds at ease – “No, Mrs. Lewrey, it’s really not as bad as everyone says. We’ll be safe and we’ll look out for her; we always look out for each other” – we really did, good cab-taking girls that we were – “I swear I’ve never even seen a bar tussle.” Which was good enough for my parents, and so off we went that very weekend to the Land of Midori melon ball shooters.
No word of a lie, guys, I had taken maybe three steps into a dive called Ozone, struck dumb by the sight of an entire dance floor of sweating bodies embarrassing themselves to the Macarena, when a bottle of blue curacao arced gracefully above my head, crashing to the tequila-soaked floorboards and igniting a 30 second fistfight between a number of the flailing group dancers. Then it was over and *I* was suddenly embarrassing myself to the Macarena, and certainly not for the last time…although that bar fight was also the first and last time I saw one of those. Also the first fight my friend had ever encountered – she really hadn’t fibbed to my folks; it was just a stupid coincidence. This is also the first time I’m sharing this story publicly, so this should come as a fun surprise for my mom should she be reading this (hi, Mom! Aren’t we glad I turned out more or less okay?!)
Uh, yes, please! Heaven knows the weather has been more daiquiri than hot toddy around here lately, but as long as the snow wishes to remain a holdout, I shan’t complain. So let’s order up a couple of them frosted (and straight-up) frozen delights and see this extended summer out in style. 🙂
Chalkboard nails. 😉 And a couple of apples for all my teacher friends. Do kids still give apples to their teachers? I’d think Starbucks gift cards go further these days – make caramel apple cider out of apples and all that good stuff.
As with all things in life – but especially friggin’ pain-in-my-arse water marble manis – practice makes perfect, so when my blogging friend Five Zero suggested – nay, demanded? – limeade nails to go along with yesterday’s frozen pink lemonade manicure, I happily snapped-to, this time with the addition of a couple of sweet Fimo fruits. Next do we have any calls for orangeade, maybe a little Orange Julius action? Or how about a strawberry daiquiri water marble? I’ll call it the Frozen Drinks of Summer Series (*immediately goes off to begin making a list of every possible type of fruit and/or rum-infused cocktail. I could be gone a while.*)
Just a few end-of-summer treats to sweeten up this hot and humid Saturday night.
Actually, pastries of any variety (but for the 3D Fimo kind I’ve used here) don’t tend to fare very well in the humidity. I went to a wedding once in a very beautiful – but un-air conditioned – venue in the very dog days of summer, and the cake slid apart in the middle of dinner. Being in frosting-covered pieces didn’t diminish its taste one iota, but knowing how much wedding cakes cost – A LOT – and knowing how much planning and effort goes into creating one – also A LOT – it was a bit of a shame. But a delicious shame, like all the very best ones. 😉
These nails, which rely heavily on those little Fimo pieces that never, ever want to lay flat on your nails, turned out much better than anticipated. Although the little Fimo fruits would not, could not, lay flat on my nails, and this manicure is impractical plus-plus. So pretty much business as usual for 3D nail art embellishments. But cute? So cute!
In combination, the two glittery polishes I used here, Smitten Polish’s green Not Your Mama’s Easter Grass and turquoise Glacial Springs, remind me of an icy tropical drink. And because no good, blue curacao-soaked frozen cocktail is complete with at least a bit of garnish, I added some of that, too. Drink up – there’s lots of good-for-you fruit in there!
Bah-dum *ching*! A little spa humour for you there. But for real, cucumber water (that mint and cucumber-infused water you’re sometimes served at spas or beauty salons) is heaven on earth. Like refreshment plus plus. Also, anything to sex up a boring old glass of water, yes?
Day 20’s theme in the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge was the dreaded old water marble, nemesis of just about all but a few gifted nail artists. Cripes, it is a technique that is just BEYOND a pain in the arse, is it not? My MO (which I forget every time I attempt to water marble, resulting in multiple go-rounds) is to work WITH my water marbling limitations, which means confining my designs and colour choices to shimmery, tone-on-tone turquoises and watery, wave-type designs. That way, the uneven designs and bitty little bubbles look like they were on purpose, like water in a bubbling brook, and not just because I totally suck at water marbles!
Then, because I both had to cover up a bit of overzealous clean-up AND because I’ve been sitting on that spa water idea for what feels like forever now, I decided to add a couple of little Fimo mint leaves and a cucumber to my index finger – the perfect refreshing touch for this very imperfect watery (marble) mani.
When my husband and I were first engaged, his family invited my family to a Thanksgiving church supper in their hometown that they attended every year. His family is moderately religious, mine even less so, yet we all agreed that church suppers always do a feast up right, and so we were going to go hardcore. Which we did. No turkeys were spared.
What was spared at our table, however, were about three half-finished bowls of jellied salad, all of it unnaturally hued and studded with unidentifiable bits of plant life. A gaggle of old ladies at our table were downright morose about the remaining salads, so much so that Mr. Finger Candy took it upon himself to eat the remaining salads. All three of them. Even the one that looked like it might have had a ribbon of mayonnaise suspended in its blue jellied depths. It was an odd ride home.
These nails remind me of those salads. Here I topped four coats of a lemon-hued jelly with two coats of Candy Lacquer’s Citrus Smoothie glitter topper, before adding a little lemon-lime garnish to my ring finger. And while it’s cute and all, AND it adheres to day three’s theme of yellow in the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge, I think the thing I like about this manicure the best is that it is literally the polish version of a jellied salad – bits of Citrus (Smoothie) suspended in jelly. Meta and delicious…but only if you’re my husband!
A couple of months ago I did a brushed-on gradient manicure with the warm sister colours to the polishes I used in this manicure – Mentality Nail Polish’s sheer green, aqua (shown below) and blue glazes, in case you were wondering – and it looked exactly like a Tequila Sunrise, one of those alarmingly coloured and potent alcoholic concoctions you can’t help but love, despite its not-from-nature hue. In any event, it would seem I’ve cozied up to the rainbow-coloured bar once again with these nails, another brushed-on manicure using Mentality’s glazes that now reminds me of a Blue Lagoon or a Blue Hawaiian or any other super stainy cocktail involving blue curacao. And what’s a cocktail without a little (fimo cane) garnish, hmm? Nothing I want to drink (that’s a lie; I’ll still drink it, even if my middle-aged constitution no longer allows for the kind of drinking that goes along with blue beverages.)
Finger Candy 