This looks like the display on a stereo from the 1980s. You know, something to measure the boom, bass and thuds. Or it’s the digital speedometer from a high school friend’s plush Crown Vic. My husband thinks it looks like the socks he wore to my parents’ for dinner last night. It could also be a gene sequencing test. So basically these are Choose Your Own Adventure nails – and which path will you take? 😉
Geographic nails – excellent practice at keeping a steady hand with a detail brush, and a great excuse to just mess around with a bunch of pretty polishes, here OPI’s royal purple, Do You Have This Color in Stock-holm?, Essie’s orchid-hued Play Date and Sally Hansen’s warm pink, No Ifs, Ands, or Buds (am I the last person on earth to resist the Oxford comma? Here it is on my nail polish, for cripes’ sake!)
I was going to start off this post by noting that this manicure is a lot like a Whatchamacallit candy bar, a chocolate confection that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be (aside from eight different kinds of yummy slammed into one log-shaped delight and smothered in cocoa, that is.)
But that assessment is not a completely accurate one. This manicure is actually more like that time on Friends when Rachel proudly presents the gang with a beef and strawberry pot pie trifle – it was supposed to be one or the other, but owing to an ill-timed flip of a page in the recipe book, it wound up being both. My particular problem is I’m feeling really quite screwed up by this weekend’s time change. MY pages have been flipped, and all day long I’ve been making the silliest little mistakes out of sheer distraction. So what started out life as another Mardi Gras-inspired mani (complete with Harlequin diamonds and the suit of cards in shades of green, purple and gold) became…this? Hey, at least it’s pretty! And that’ll have to be good enough for now.
But I still don’t know what to call it.
Closing out the weekend with these simple geometric nails featuring two accent nails in a polish that makes everything it touches look a bit like pavement, or a very fine granite counter top, Chaotic by Formula X by Sephora.
Wishing you all the best end to the week, friends. A demain!
When it comes to my taste in music (“My taste in music is your face”?), I always defer to the wise words of Natasha Lyonne’s character, Christine, in one of my favourite movies, Detroit Rock City: “Good tunes is good tunes, be it disco or rock or polka or whatever have you, regardless of the category.” That she’s blazed to the eyeballs when she unloads that bit of wisdom doesn’t diminish the sentiment – labels in music are bullshit. Who freaking cares so long as it moves you?
I wasn’t always so zen about the musical lines that divide. In fact, after having spent a large portion of my teenage years jammed inside a sweaty little brick-walled concert hall with 500 of my now-closest friends, blowing out both my eardrums and my brain cells on barely listenable punk-ish rock (Fugazi, I’m looking at you), I became THAT PERSON. You know that person – that completely annoying music snob who looks down her nose at everything that’s not within her pretty limited musical wheelhouse (alt rock, and the less mainstream, the better.) Ugh, that girl was such a tool.
These days, I take a much more relaxed approach to the music that moves me. When I’m in the car at least, I ride Sirius HARD, which is how I somewhat recently discovered twenty one pilots, the band that inspired these nails. Sure, it all started with that Stressed Out song (their most popular, another little tidbit of non-hardcoreness that would have majorly irked me back in the day) but pretty soon I was checking out their videos on YouTube (in the video for House of Gold, they’re floating, ukulele-playing torsos!) and then quite obsessively checking out their videos on YouTube (pretty sure at this point I should just rename it PilotTube) and then buying all of their albums in both digital and physical formats so I’m never, ever without their weirdo, two-person alt rock clanging around inside my head, which is how I managed to memorize all of the songs off their last two albums – including the most recent, Blurryface – in the span of about a week and a half.
Yeah, I’ve got it bad. So, so bad. I love everything about them, and unabashedly so – the skeleton hoodies, the bike messenger pants, the ukulele, the accordion, the KEYTAR, the cute-as-hell boymance between the only two guys in the band, their whole small-town-kids-barely-grown-up-DIYness…I’ve gone full-on fangirl here, as I may have mentioned when I did these Suicide Squad nails last week. And what do I do when I’m fangirling hard for something? I put it on my nails, of course. For this manicure, I attempted the band’s logo, as well as a few geographic designs inspired by Blurryface’s black, red and white album artwork.
So this is totally the tile backsplash in the Golden Girls’ Miami kitchen, right? We just need an always-at-the-ready and ever-so artfully displayed cherry cheesecake parked in the foreground and we’ll be all set!
For these free-handed geometric nails (striping tape makes me itchy) I used four Essie polishes from last year’s summer collection, white Private Weekend, pale lemon Chillato, coral Peach Side Babe and baby blue Salt Water Happy, outlining the design in a favourite Pure Ice polish, lime green Wild Thing.
Triangle pointes, I suppose that should probably read (and in a few instances, something that could most charitably be described as one of those chubby aluminum trees Charlie Brown passes up in favour of The Little Tree That Could.) Free-handed, as always, because I know no other way.
For this geometric mani, I used a couple of polishes that made separate appearances earlier in the week, China Glaze’s jade green Four Leaf Clover and Nails Inc.’s cobalt Baker Street. Both rich, saturated jewel tones, they were the perfect colour choice(s) for these totally free-handed nails (no striping tape, boo-yah!) that were just as fussy and time-consuming to complete as you’d think. Not gonna hide that fact. Although sitting around waiting for all that black outlining to dry did enable me to listen to two and a half hours of a commentary track writer/director/professional talker Kevin Smith recorded for the 1992 Tim Burton movie, Batman Returns. It was absolutely hilarious, and peppered with all sorts of fun trivia, and made me laugh so hard, I zigged when I should have zagged and nearly had to redo my index finger. Bit of a warning there when it comes to guffawing whilst nail art-ing. Still, pretty funny stuff.
Hot on the heels of my Wax On, Wax Off post of the other day, I decided to do a full-on Rosegirls manicure, a sure sign that something has worked its way into my heart – nothing says love like immortalizing it on your nails. Rosegirls has a very cute little logo, and those colourful little wax chunks were just calling out for the nail art treatment. I could not say no. 🙂
Blocked-out, Fall-hued nails for the theme of geometric in the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge.
Finger Candy 