Easter Bunny Baskets

Sort of? These nails didn’t turn out quite the way I had intended, mostly because of that peachy-looking jelly polish there with the neon bar glitter. It’s actually a neon glitter topper in a clear base – Polish Me Silly’s Giggles & Wiggles – or at least it used to be. In the six months or so since I last used it, nearly every ounce of colour has leached out of the pink and yellow bars, staining the clear base polish a watery peach I like not one bit. The base for this manicure is actually one coat of Giggles & Wiggles over two coats of OPI’s cream-coloured My Vampire is Buff. Not that you’d know it. Long story short, I was aiming for a very different look here, although the little Easter baskets are pretty cute.

A small, grumbly word about misbehaving lacquers. It pains me to say this, because I generally like Polish Me Silly’s products very much (to say nothing of the unpublished post I recently drafted extolling their indie virtues) but it sometimes feels as though in the race to be FIRST!!! and on-the-bleeding-edge innovative, some indies occasionally sacrifice quality. Frankly, I question the quality assurance that went into the making of this polish, particularly when I look at a couple of their other polishes in my stash and find them (mis)behaving in exactly the same manner.

I own quite a few (mini) bottles of Polish Me Silly’s polishes, maybe 20 overall. It makes simple statistical sense that out of those 20, one or two will not be up to my snuff. That’s not a terrible average, and I won’t cease being a Polish Me Silly customer because of it, but you’d better believe that next purchase, I’m looking very carefully at what’s going into my virtual shopping cart. Buyer beware and all that smart financial sense. The more you know!

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!

Raspberry White Chocolate Swirl

A beautiful, but temperamental, raspberry-hued polish topped with one of my favourite nail art designs, the spiral. I’m lousy at tribal designs and geometrics aren’t really my thing, but give me a clean, rounded edge and I’m off to the races. I’m like the Frank Gehry of nail art. Here I used OPI’s My Vampire is Buff over top of A England’s Rose Bower, a gorgeous but difficult to wrangle holographic polish the exact rich raspberry shade of a rose blossom.

I’ll note that after I took these photos, I went over the swirls with a textured glitter polish, Zoya’s Godiva, thinking it’d add some great visual interest and a little subtle sparkle. What actually happened was the slight grey tint of the sparkles clashed with the slight cream tint of the swirls, creating an unholy, almost greasy-looking effect that led me to angrily exclaim to my husband, “God, it just looks like someone sneezed on them!” And that’s a reaction you NEVER want to have to your nail art!

The Christmas Sweater

In my favourite Christmas movie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Ellen Griswold, family matriarch and the only thing standing between her husband Clark and certain death, wears the most amazing black cashmere sweater printed with little white snowflakes and red hearts. I loved that sweater when I was a kid and I continue to love it now; it certainly feels like something ModCloth might come through for me on!

Here I took the black and white and red theme and turned it a bit on its head, adding some wintery design details to three coats of my favourite new base, OPI’s My Vampire is Buff. I then topped the whole thing off with Essie’s Matte About You, which I regrettably applied a touch too early, resulting in a bit of smudging. Or I *meant* to do that and those are tiny pulls in the “fabric” of the “sweater”…yeah, okay, we’ll go with that. 😉

Send in the Clowns

These nails, just a not-so-simple holographic glitter topper over an opaque base, look a bit like the brutal aftermath of an explosion at the circus, Clown Division. I’ve got the lion tamers represented on my other hand, and you don’t even want to know what those look like. 😉

These nails also feature two of my favourite products, OPI’s My Vampire is Buff, my new go-to base colour, and as always, Candy Lacquer’s Fairlyland glitter topper. Just beautiful stuff – holographic hexes, stars, half moons, diamonds, butterflies…like Lucky Charms in a bottle. And interestingly enough, just about as edible!