Just Bead It

For week two’s theme of April showers in this month’s N.A.I.L. challenge, I went with a fun little design I’ve been meaning to try for ages now, a super simple dab-on technique I call a “Topcoat raindrops beaded up on the hood of a custom painted Charger”-icure. Yes, that is a VERY specific term, and I don’t expect it to catch on at all, but a nail girl can hope. 🙂 It goes a little something like this:

1. Paint your nails to opacity in any colour you’d like. Finish-wise, I think super high shine, colour-shifting multichromes work best, and really drive (eh?!) home the custom paint job effect we’re going for here. For these nails I used three coats of Polish Me Silly’s indigo-to-plum Holy Shift.

2. Once dry, top with one thin coat of a quick dry, high gloss topcoat like Seche Vite.

3. Once it’s dry, take that same bottle of topcoat and, brushing off almost the fluid, dab it onto your nails in a random raindrop pattern. There needs to be enough topcoat on your brush so that it flows smoothly off the brush and onto your nail, but not so much that it swamps your manicure. You’re looking for beads of water here; it’s a bit of a delicate dance. Thankfully, this is such an easy technique, do-overs are not quite the hair-rending prospect they might be with any other type of manicure.

4. Lay your hands down flat and let dry. And try not to pick! Which you totally will, because I did, even though the little beaded up bits of topcoat are not that intrusive. It’s just second nature to want to eradicate any nail art lumps and bumps. It’s the manicure equivalent of tonguing that little cut on the roof of your mouth – you know you should just leave it alone, let it heal, BUT. YOU. CAN’T!!!

Still, a super fun, lightning fast and mega easy technique that’s sure to impress your more vehicularly-minded friends and requires nothing more than two basic nail art items you undoubtedly already have in your stash. Sweet!

Duelling Duochromes (OMD2)

I’m still playing catch-up with the first week’s themes in the Oh Mon Dieu 2 nail art challenge, so of course it makes the kind of sense that doesn’t that I’m leapfrogging over the theme of dark (in my head, all I hear is douchey Batman from The Lego Movie growling that he only builds in black or very, very dark grey) and heading straight to the sixth day’s challenge prompt, duochrome. For the uninitiated, duochrome polishes are ultra shiny, mega light-reflecting polishes that flash two different colours depending on the angle of your hand. By the same token, multichromes are megawatt polishes that reflect a whole spectrum of rainbow-throwing colours.

For these nails, I layered two complimentary purple multichromes (they were the only chromes I had, duo, multi or otherwise), Polish Me Silly’s Guilty Pleasure and Holy Shift, one atop the other in a subtle gradient, topping them off with a multichromatic glitter topper, Ozotic’s 528, before dotting on what I think I had intended to be a Milky Way-type event (the astronomical kind, not the chocolate bar), but what unfortunately looks more like a wonkily-sewn zipper. There’s a lot going on here, but improbably, it’s not a gigantic mess, and my nails twinkle so prettily from so many different angles, I really can’t complain. In the photo below, taken before I added the celestial dots and topcoat, you can really see the gradient effect (one of my better ones, actually, no doubt because of the colour-softening nature of multichrome polishes.)

Purple Paisley

Either my Pun-o-Meter is completely on the fritz or I have well and truly begun running out of funny titles for my posts, because I SWEAR there are no amusing things to say about paisley. Although I know some people who have very strong and somewhat controversial opinions on the subject of paisley, so apparently it’s something worth talking about, but just not punning about? Interesting. Very interesting.

For these nails, in honour of tomorrow’s Father’s Day (because dads like lame things like ties, amirite?!) I did a gold paisley tie print over top of two ultra luxe and silky chromatic polishes, Polish Me Silly’s plum and purple-toned Guilty Pleasure and Holy Shift.  It’s a fairly tacky combination of colour and print – like sporting Vegas on your nails – and I think if my dad owned such a tie, I’d probably tell him to kill it with fire.  But pretty for nails!  And as always, we’re here for the nails, not father fashion. 🙂

Let’s Get Shift Faced

One naughty turn of phrase always deserves another, and seeing as the name of this lacquer – Polish Me Silly’s Holy Shift – is such delightful wordplay, I couldn’t be expected to hold back on my end, now could I?

Here I’ve shown the second Polish Me Silly multichrome to fall into my lap this weekend, the aforementioned Holy Shift. It was a difficult one to photograph, as the colour change – royal blurple to a dusky, plummy-gold – isn’t hugely pronounced, but please trust me when I say it’s better than beautiful; a touch more subdued than your typical chromatic polishes and with real depth.