Wakey, wakey! The 31-Day Nail Art Challenge Day 3: Yellow!

Yellow!  Such a divisive hue among us nail bloggers... For some, a summery, sunshiney hue that brings images of bright cocktails and ripe fruit; for others, however, it invokes images of stained nailbeds or gives us the dreaded lobster hands!  I personally like yellow nail polish (usually), though until recently, I had only one sad, lonely yellow in my collection.  I now own... wait for it... three!  Yes, three.  I only used two for this mani though!

This was a fun one!  I had a couple of ideas, but none of them were very original, and one I had already done on my blog before!  Ultimately, this is what I came up with:

Eggs and bacon!  I hope that you can tell what it is, lol.  I am a big lover of eggs, and though I rarely buy bacon due to the price and fattiness, it is indeed delicious!  For this manicure, I used a base of Revlon Colorstay Buttercup (I have green gel underneath, which is peeking out around the edges, because I failed to cover it up properly.  Womp womp.).  I painted the egg whites with China Glaze White On White, and used a large dotting tool to paint the egg yolks with Julie G Canary Islands.  I used L'Oreal Mauvelous to paint on the bacon strips, and then painted little lines on the bacon using Pure Ice En Vogue and OPI My Vampire is Buff with an ultra fine tipped nail art brush.  Finally, I used black acrylic paint to outline everything with an ultra fine tipped nail art brush, and topped the whole thing with Salon Perfect Top Coat!

If you are interested in participating, check out the image below (courtesy of Sarah at Chalkboard Nails here - thanks Sarah!)

Thanks for stopping by, and don't forget to check out the amazing work of other nail artists for today's prompt below (and add your own link)!

An InLinkz Link-up

Updated French Tips - An "Interview" Manicure

Hi guys!  I've been job hunting like crazy since I moved to Tennessee, but it's been slow going... I've had two interviews for positions in my field (one was a disaster - all of the employees I spoke to, including my interviewers, couldn't stop talking about how little they were paid and how they couldn't wait to retire!), but since I don't know how long it will take to get a job in my field, I have applied to some other, "fun" jobs as well to fill the void in my bank account!
Yesterday, I had an interview with a popular women's clothing store that I won't name specifically (though it rhymes with Tan Sailor...).  Since interviews in my field always call for quite conservative looks, I wanted to do something a bit more modern and fashionable, but still classy and interview appropriate.  I settled on the classic french tip with a few modifications:

I apologize for the less than crisp photo; until I'm bringing in a paycheck
there's a moratorium on both polish (!!!) and lighting setup supplies :(

 First, I used OPI Don't Bossa-Nova Me Around, a pale pinky-neutral base, rather than a sheer.  I then applied skinny french tips that were thinner than my true nail line, which creates an illusion of longer fingers.  For the french tips I used Sally Hansen Chrome Nail Makeup in White Gold (There are quite a few near-dupes for this around; in case you can't get hold of this one online.  Essie Good as Gold is pretty close). 

Another note worth mentioning is the topcoat that I used - having run out of my go-to Salon Perfect top coat, I stopped at Walmart to pick some up only to find that they were out.  I ended up picking up some Revlon Diamond Gel Topcoat (non-UV-curing) to try out, because it seemed like it should be comparable.  A few minutes after my mani (around dinner time), the Revlon was dry to the touch and seemed cured... until I got up the next day with sheet marks :(  Not cool, Revlon.  Back to Salon Perfect, as soon as I can find it...

Have a great week!

Bunny Prints Skittle Pond Nail Art with OPI Sheer Tints

A few weeks ago I purchased the mini OPI Sheer Tints set.  I couldn't justify spending US $36 on polishes I probably wouldn't use that often, so I ended up springing (ha! no pun intended!) for the mini set (OPI Sheer Tints, Sheer Mini Hint of Tint).  There are two manicures I've been dying to try lately:  a pond manicure (see some amazing examples here and here) and a syrup manicure (here and here).  I've done the former here:

Please ignore my desiccated cuticles.

I've seen  lot of pond manicures that do dots or flowers, but with Easter coming up, I wanted to do something a bit different... enter, bunny prints!  For this manicure I used the Bundle Monster plate BM-424 to create the "bunny prints" between layers of OPI Sheer Tints topcoat.  Above, from pinky to thumb:  'I'm Never Amberrassed', 'Be Magentale With Me', 'I Can Teal You Like Me', 'Don't Violet Me Down', and 'I Can Teal You Like Me' again.

If you're not familiar with the concept of a pond manicure, it's similar to a jelly sandwich:  jelly/glitter/jelly; except triple or quadruple decker, and with light colored polish designs rather than glitter.  To make this design, I stamped little paws haphazardly and sparsely across bare nail.  I then topped it off with one of the sheer tints, and waited for it to dry.  I then layered more paw prints in other areas of the nail, and topped it off with another layer of sheer tint.  I repeated the stamp-tint step one more time (for a total of three layers of OPI sheer tint) and added one more set of paw prints to fill in any gaps and add another layer of dimension.  I then topped it off with a clear top coat.

Lefty.

For this manicure, I used the following products:

• Base coat:  Sally Hansen Hard as Nails - Hard as Wraps
• L'Oreal  French Tip White
• OPI Sheer Tints minis in 'I'm Never Amberrassed', 'Be Magentale With Me', 'I Can Teal You Like Me', and 'Don't Violet Me Down'
• Bundle Monster Stamping Plate in BM-424
• Konad stamper
• Top coat: Salon Perfect Top Coat

These worked great for a pond manicure, but I think they would be too sheer for a syrup manicure (unless you used like seven coats).  These definitely have a top coat formula; they smell similar to Seche Vite and Salon Perfect top coats and have similar qualities in terms of texture and drying time (i.e. glop it on like there's no tomorrow).  This was convenient, because the number of steps for this manicure would have made it a prohibitively long process if I had to wait ten to fifteen minutes before stamping each time.  As it was, I had to wait about 30 seconds.  On the negative side, it dried SO fast that I kept getting little polish strings everywhere, and if I used more than three strokes to cover the nail it started getting bumpy and draggy.

Squiiiiiishy!

Weirdly, I think my favorite color of the set is the yellow.  While I usually associate sheer, yellow nail color with stained or diseased nailbeds, the orangey-gold tone to this yellow translates more as "bright squishy marigold" rather than "witch fingers."  They are all pretty similar in terms of application, so it's really a matter of color preference.  In these photos, all of the colors except 'I Can Teal You Like Me' are represented pretty accurately; in real life, 'I Can Teal You Like Me' is much more of a teal (go figure) than a blue as it is shown here

Overall, I am really enjoying this mani.  I used this set once previously for a pond pedi and enjoyed that as well!  For the price (I paid $10.35 for the set of minis on Amazon), I think these are a great value and were definitely worth adding to my collection.

Have you ever done a pond manicure?

Bonus spring pedi picture!  Lookit my weird toes!