Kaleidoscope Candy

Cheery sprinkled nails (using Cirque’s gold glitter standard, Kaleidoscope) for this cheery Saturday morning.  Hope your weekends are kicking off most delightfully, friends! 🙂

Pink Frosted Donut: A Then and Now Post

One of my earliest nail art designs was Cirque’s rainbow-hued Kaleidoscope glitter topper over one coat of Nails Inc.’s Notting Hill Gate, a sheer, hot pink jelly polish (see below.) It made for a super cute mani, like those yummy-looking pink frosted donuts that only exist on The Simpsons, but my execution was ever so slightly off – the base polish was too sheer (oh, the horrors of visible nail lines!) and my nail care game was still pretty well non-existent (here’s a nail art truth for you, gang – taking care of your mini canvasses makes everything that comes after it about a million times easier. It’s very much like having a clean desk or a tidy workspace in that you can concentrate on your work because you’re not being distracted by all the mess heaped about your feet. Plus it just looks better!)

So with those lessons in mind, I decided to dip my fingers into the frosting once again and recreate that fun, sprinkled donut design, only this time with the benefit of hindsight and some appreciably improved skills. The end result? A manicure that’s really not so different from its predecessor in terms of design, but noticeably different in the important areas of execution and overall effect. Gone are the dreaded visible nail lines that came about as a result of using but one coat of the jelly polish (I actually don’t have a problem with them, but some lacqueristas RAGE when confronted with VNLs, as they’re sometimes called), the result of swapping out Notting Hill Gate for Fingers Paints’ Louvre This Pink, a sheer-ish, yet still opaque, raspberry creme that offers great coverage and frosting-like shine in two coats. Gone as well is the poor lighting and the inexplicably skewed framing, although those are issues I’d file under photography skills – not the best, but also getting encouragingly better – as opposed to nail art technique. Most importantly, though, this slightly updated manicure shows off the clean simplicity of tidy, nicely polished nails (even if those nails are sprinkled with an inch of rainbow glitter), a skill – yes, here in the nail art world it’s a skill – that has proven its worth time and time again.

One ought not judge a book by its cover, but in so many facets of life – nail art included – presentation is key. So try to keep your work clean, tidy up after yourself and look for those simple, easily achievable little ways you can update old manis to create new favourites that highlight your improved skills and breathe fresh life into designs whose only sins were being created at a time when your nail art game weren’t all that. To experience and progress – and those are sentiments I think we can all raise our pink-sprinkled donuts to.

Kaleidoscope Seuss

I often refer to this polish, Cirque’s multi-coloured Kaleidoscope glitter topper, as Dr. Seuss in a bottle. With its mixture of fun, geometric shapes in a rainbow’s worth of primary colours, it speaks to the part of me that loves the vibrant Seussian aesthetic, if not the books themselves (I know, I know, what’s wrong with me? Candy corn, large bodies of water, bubble tea and now Dr. Seuss – is there anything I *do* like? Cats. I like cats very much. Pasta, too.)

Jelly Belly

Ooh, I love a good jelly sandwich manicure.  All that lovely, glossy, glitter-embedded squashiness makes for some very pretty nails, the kind that look as though they were much more trouble than they actually were.  As such, it’s a great technique for newbie nail artists who would like to try their hand at a fun, great-looking design without straying too far from the basics.  All you really need is a sheer polish, a favourite glitter topper and a steady hand.  Here I’ve shown two different jelly sandwich manicures featuring four different polishes, although the technique changed not one iota between the two – simply lay down a few coats of a sheer, jelly-like polish (don’t get too hung up on the nomenclature; whether it’s called a sheer, a jelly or a translucent, what you’re looking for is a sheer polish that won’t completely obliterate the glitter you’re laying it on top of), then a coat (or two, or three) of a glitter topper, finally topping the whole works off with one even coat of the base jelly.  What you’re left with is a prettily subdued version of the glitter you used, seemingly nestled and embedded in the squishy-looking jelly polish.  Sounds sort of gross, looks super pretty and requires no more effort than an ordinary old mani, so what have you got to lose? 🙂

For these two jelly sandwiches I used (top) Polish Me Silly’s black-and-neon speckled Trouble Maker between Revlon’s pale pink Sheer Blossom and (bottom) Cirque’s rainbow-in-a-bottle Kaleidoscope between Essie’s off-white Adore-a-Ball.

Jawbreaker

These nails, nothing more involved than Cirque’s Kaleidoscope rainbow glitter topper over OPI’s now-ubiquitous My Vampire is Buff, remind me of speckled candy jawbreakers. It’s a super cool effect for very little effort, particularly when the glitter is doing all the heavy lifting.

On an unrelated/related note, has anyone besides me and the friend I watched it with ever seen the movie Jawbreaker? It’s one of those lost ’90s movies – not a “new classic” like She’s All That or American Pie, but still enjoyable (?) in its own peculiar way. It starred Rose McGowan, Julie Benz (Darla, for all you Buffy and Angel fans), some other girl I can’t remember and a very nasty Judy Greer in what was probably one of her first roles. I haven’t seen it in years because it’s really not that good, but it’s worth a watch if a) you’d like to see someone choke to death on a giant jawbreaker or b) you’re down with a totally random and highly squicky sex scene between Rose McGowan and her then fiancé, Marilyn Manson. It’s just as pervy and gross as you’d expect it to be, to the power of, like, 20.

Oh, but there’s this one scene that has since been copied in about 20 different young adult-oriented movies where the girls of the super bitch clique are strutting down the halls of their high school while the lesser beings they’re forced to matriculate with leap out of the way in fear and awe. It’s an awesome scene, but still maybe not enough to make up for the rest!

Sprinkle Donut

These nails, a simple glitter topper over a jelly finish polish, remind me of two things:

1. Homer Simpson’s favourite pink sprinkled donuts, and

2. A super expensive Deborah Lippmann polish called Candy Shop. This combo makes an excellent lower-cost dupe, as they say in the nail polish biz.

Here I used Cirque’s Kaleidoscope glitter topper over Nails Inc.’s Notting Hill Gate, a beautiful neon pink jelly. Mmmm, jelly…

Green Eggs and Ham

Literary/existential question: Are both the eggs and the ham green, or just the eggs? I always assumed it was both, as normal, pink-coloured ham just doesn’t go very well with Dr. Seuss’s signature eye-searing colour palette.

I recently managed to get my paws on a bottle of Cirque’s Kaledioscope rainbow glitter topper. The primary colours reminded me so much of Dr. Seuss’s red, white and everything-in-between world, I thought I’d try my hand at a bit of Seussian nail art.

And as my husband pointed out, I’m getting distressingly good at painting hams on my nails. Or in Seuss-ese, adept at lacquered hams, I am. 😉