Clover/Under

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  To those celebrating this afternoon, tonight and early tomorrow morning, I hope you have a wonderful time, but please remember to do so responsibly.  Hail a cab, call a ride-sharing service, buddy up and walk your drunk butts home (the exercise and fresh air would do you some good!) – anything but behind the wheel of a car, okay?  This has been my yearly St. Patrick’s Day PSA; thank you for listening.

Really, though, a weekend St. Patrick’s Day in my any-excuse-to-tie-one-on hometown is cause for alarm.  I actually don’t plan on even leaving the house today – I’ll just binge drink at home like a proper Irish Canadian woman (joke, joke!)

No matter my plans, however, my nails will be looking festive and fly in this old school KB Shimmer polish, Get Clover It.  I’ve had this polish forever, and it’s a favourite – I love its clear, dark green jelly base, lit from within with micro-glitter like the world’s most beautiful pickle, and its lush mix of metallic circle glitter.  Heh, pickle.  Anyways, stay safe, party peeps.

Kiss Me, I’m Delicious!

Also Irish (or part Irish on my mom’s side) and totally kissable, thanks to this seasonally-hued lime sugar lip scrub I whipped up today.  It’s so criminally easy, it feels ridiculous even including a recipe, but a little instruction is always nice.  And so here’s how to make your own delicious, four-ingredient lip scrub this St. Patrick’s Day, or any other day of the week.

Step 1: Round up your ingredients – white granulated sugar, coconut oil, lime juice and food colouring.

Step 2: Gather any utensils you need for mixing – a small bowl, a silicone spatula and a couple of measuring spoons.

Step 3: Add the ingredients to the bowl in the following proportions and stir well:

7 tablespoons white sugar
2 tablespoons coconut oil
1 1/2 teaspoons lime juice
One (and I do mean one; otherwise, you’ll wind up with neon green lips) drop of lime green food colouring.

(A couple of teaspoons of finely grated lime zest would be a lovely, zingy addition to this scrub that wouldn’t affect the consistency one bit; I would have added some had I any!)

Step 4: Spoon into a small plastic container with a lid (or small lidded jars if you’re giving them away, as I mostly am) and enjoy!

Ah, but how does one enjoy?  Simply swipe the scrub onto your mug, buff it about for a bit and then wipe (or wash) it off, before sealing in all that lovely moisture with your favourite lip balm.  And if you accidentally ingest it?  So what?  It’s completely edible, and really rather delicious (although I wouldn’t sit down to a bowl of the stuff, you know?)

So there you have it, super kissable lips just in time for getting your Irish smooch on this St. Patrick’s Day.

Clover/Under

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Coming at you this evening with some very simple clover nail art atop a festive polish I don’t use nearly enough, OPI’s hunter green Live and Let Die.  Live and Let Die was released in 2012 as part of OPI’s Skyfall Collection, so a bit of an oldie here.  Also one I did not forget to pair with a base coat, on account of its fine golden shimmer, which, while beautiful on the nail and in the bottle, combines with the green base to create mega stain-y turquoise.  And we all know what turquoise does to bare nails (stains, precisely!)  So polish safe, friends, and enjoy the rest of your evenings!

A Pre-Paddy Mani

More green for you today in anticipation of tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day, when presumably I’ll break out the clover-shaped big guns.  Just no leprechauns, because my Irish mother would flip her curly, brunette lid.  Also beware all references to bogs, shalaylees and colcannon (actually, colcannon, a mixture of buttery mashed potatoes and cabbage or kale, is dee-licious.  Studiously ignore my mother on this point; I do!)

For this minty mani, I layered Enchanted Polish’s pale green holo, March 2015, with two coats of Whimsical Ideas by Pam’s There’s No Place Like Home, a glimmering, green-and-gold glitter.  Perfectly Paddy. 😉

Get Clover It!

That’s the name of this polish, a favourite of mine from KB Shimmer, although it’s also an apt directive, because you really should get Get Clover It – it’s a gorgeous polish, and oh-so appropriate for any St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans you may have planned.

Speaking of, I’d like to take a moment to issue my annual two-part St. Patrick’s Day request – call it a Pre-Paddy PSA.  First, don’t drink and drive.  Call a cab, take the bus, pass out at the base of the McDonald’s drive-thru window in the midst of ordering a Shamrock Shake, whatever – just don’t get behind the wheel of a car, please.

And secondly, a tip most germane to this blog, particularly in the lead-up to St. Patrick’s Day – if you paint your nails green, for the love of all that’s holy, use a base coat first. Really, don’t even THINK about painting your nails green without laying down a coat or two of a base polish first.  Because had I taken a moment and thought about it, and painted on that clear coat of polish, protecting my nails from the pigmented onslaught of Colors by Llarowe’s grass green Gemini Rising back at the beginning of December 2015, I may not have had to live with noticeably piss green nails until just two days ago.  That’s right, the staining was so bad, I simply had to wait until my nails grew out, and that took four months.  So believe me when I harp on about base coat – I regrettably know of that which I speak!

Clover Candy

I’m coming at you with multiple posts today (bandaged such as they are) because as it turns out, while I may not be down for a big, rowdy evening of debautched Irishing, I *am* rather fond of St. Patrick’s Day-themed nail art. That combined with the fact that I own approximately 20 green polishes (a rather surprising discovery; I’d never call green my favourite anything) means I’m more than equipped to handle multiple manis in honour of, and inspired by, St. Paddy’s Day.

For this manicure, I went with a Lucky Charms-type look by pairing Cirque’s clover-hued holo, Panacea, with Candy Lacquer’s pastel matte glitter bomb, Carnival Games. I’ve often referred to one of Carnival Games’ sisters, Fairyland, as “Lucky Charms in a bottle,” but with its super summery mix of matte glitters in every shape, size and colour (no hearts and clovers, but there are stars and circles, donuts and triangles) Carnival Games is pure, crusty marshmallow goodness in a bottle. 🙂

And just look at this combination in gigantic, macro-sized close-up! Beautiful (plus I’m finally getting the hang of the macro lenses my husband gave me for Christmas, huzzah!)

We Like to Party Hard

As the delightfully weird Andrew W.K. once said. Happy St. Patrick’s Day, friends! Whatever Irish-inspired tomfoolery you get up to today (including, but certainly not limited to, drinking whiskey, sporting enormous curly hair, dropping the H in certain words so everything comes out as “tis,” “tat” and “the udder ting”, eating a mountain of colcannon, having freckles that number in the millions, picking fights with your relatives, drinking more whiskey, breaking your ass while attempting the two moves you remember from your one (hated) year of Irish dance, hanging out with anybody named Sean, Fiona, Liam, Seamus, Kelly or some combination of the above, running out of whiskey and deciding that five-year-old flavoured vodka mixed with white wine will make an acceptable substitute (it doesn’t) or getting rowdy down at the pub) please keep it safe and responsible, yeah? Pretending to be Irish for the day is no reason to act like you’ve lost your freakin’ mind. I mean, sure, you’re willingly ingesting cheap, domestic beer that’s been “enhanced” with green food dye and probably dancing in public – badly – but there’s no reason to go all the way off the rails now. So stay safe, friends, and party responsibly.

And when the party finally stops (curse the drinking holiday that falls on a weekday), you’ll have no problem hailing a cab with hands sporting this pretty, festive manicure. Here I layered Whimsical Ideas by Pam’s green and gold holographic glitter, There’s No Place Like Home, over a basic black, Pure Ice’s Black Out, and then in a sort of top-down gradient over another Pure Ice polish, a green and gold shimmer called Lucky Charming. Sláinte!

Come on Clover, Baby

I’ll note for the squeamish and/or gore-curious that at the end of this post – spoiler! – there will be blood. Because it is simply one of those truisms of the nail art world that the second you get cocky about something – your abilities with a detail brush, the health of your nails, the unblemished skin of your hands – is the precise moment everything will fall spectacularly to pieces. This actually holds true for most things in life, but especially the world of nail art, where one day you think to yourself, “Wow, it has been a REALLY long time since I broke a nail” and the next you’re contending with two broken nails, a clipper-inflicted nick and an inch-long gouge on the index finger of your swatching hand where you scraped it across a deeply embedded, tetanus-producing carpet staple you were attempting to yank out of the underside of your stairs. True story (see below)!

But until everything went pie shaped, things were going pretty well with these festive, glittery gradient nails I cobbled together for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow. Here I used two of my stainiest polishes, Essie’s dark green Pretty Edgy and Pure Ice’s grass green Wild Thing, in a simple gradient, topping the whole thing off with one coat of Cinapro’s Nail Sugar in Hyperactive, a goldy-green holographic glitter in a sheer lime base. Then I added a tiny clover accent nail, but who’s going to notice that when there’s all this yeeeeeeeeee-OUCH going on?

Shamrock Shake It, Don’t Break It

Seeing as my water marble manis invariably wind up looking like I just plain old *lost* my marbles, I thought I’d use that bit of wisdom to my advantage and go with the abstract flow, a decision that resulted in these creamy, dreamy, super swirly Shamrock Shake-inspired nails. And because I’m powerless to resist the lure of putting cutesie faces on foodstuffs on my nails, I’ve got a wee little shake on my ring finger getting down with hiz bad self. I particularly like how he’s staring at his own butt – it’s very Cameron Diaz dancing in her super hero undies in Charlie’s Angels.

Shamrocks and Shenanigans

With regards to St. Patrick’s Day, my (Irish) mother is fond of saying the Irish don’t need a special day to binge drink and get rowdy – the impetus is always there; the beast just needs to be let out of its cage. I’m not quite so militant about St. Paddy’s Day, but I’ve never cared much to get in touch with my Celtic roots in any way that would require me to stand in a horribly crowded, faux-Irish “pub” with 500 drunken strangers shouting “I’m River Dancing!” whilst sloshing green beer all over myself. That’s pretty much my idea of hell. That and one of those white parties on a yacht off the coast of Ibiza. So in lieu of engaging in either of those activities (although one of these things is not like the other!) I’ll sport this cloverrific mani instead.