my financial aid fingernails!

Demure manis are not typically my style….but I need to look professional this week! I flew JetBlue to Orlando FL on monday for a work conference. I am a financial aid advisor and every year my university sends me to the big Federal Student Aid conference to hear all about the upcoming changes to aid programs. One new 2013 initiative for US financial aid is a streamline of their websites! They are retiring the many, many pages for finaid….and created a new one called studentaid.gov  (they’re also on twitter, storify, and youtube). I am loving this! Apparently President Obama created an executive order for the US Dept of Ed to shape up their outreach and digital presence. The new studentaid.gov site is a great solution…. students and parents should check it out!

Moving on to my mani… I decided that OPI’s Don’t Pretzel My Buttons would be nice n professional-looking. (However the girl sitting next to me right now has a rad black n gold crackle mani…and on the other side there’s a lady with a wicked glittery purple mani). Oh well….it’s good for me to go neutral sometimes! Lol. I am really growing to looove this polish too. It sorta looks like creamy putty melted onto my fingertips 🙂

OPI Don’t Pretzel My Buttons

I had to apply three coats of Don’t Pretzel my Buttons to get it completely opaque. I used Orly Bonder as a base coat and Seche as topcoat…so I figured this mani would last me for the whole conference. I hope so cuz I despise traveling with chips! Oh yeah- I also stamped some Konad M57 on my pinkies just for some extra flavor! Hope you like it!

Thanksgiving nail fail!

Happy thanksgiving to all my American girls out there! I had this great thanksgiving nail design idea swimming around in my head for days! My inspiration was the newspaper nails technique.  My rendition was to cut out pics of favorite thanksgiving-type foods from the supermarket flyer and imprint them on my white nails. Too bad it was an epic fail! Lol! But the design is still kind of fun so I thought I’d share some pics anyway.

I scoured the Stop n Shop flyer to find and clip images of (from left to right) frenchs french fried onions, turkey, stove top stuffing, ocean spray cranberry sauce, and cool whip! Yummy!! Too bad all the words transpose backwards when using the newspaper nails technique! I knew they’d be backwards… but I thought the text would be dark enough and the logos would be recognizable enough to really stand out and look reminiscent of the foods in our thanksgiving shopping cart!  Maybe the colored print from the flyers I used didn’t transfer as well as newspaper print does?  I also had a hard time applying my Pure Ice polish.  This greyish white polish called Super Star! happens to be the only bottle of Pure Ice that I own. Not sure if it’s just Super Star, or if all of their shades are like this… but the formula was not my fave.  The consistency kinda reminded me of white-out and the skinny brush made application difficult and streaky.

Oh well! So my thanksgiving nail design fell a little flat, but i had a great holiday!  Hope you all had a wonderful time with family and friends and that you didn’t have to go to work!

I Need a Refresh-Mint

11/23/12–HERE’S A LITTLE UPDATE ON THIS POLISH: This megalast polish lasted forever!  I got a small chip on the 8th day, so I removed the polish on the 9th day.  I was super-impressed with it’s longevity.  This stuff rocks!! here’s my original post:

11/15/12– Isn’t this a cute name for a polish?  “I Need a Refresh-Mint” is part of the megalast line from wet n wild.   I was a little perplexed when I found it at the store- I couldn’t figure out why they named it mint-anything…. it really looked light blue to me under the fluorescents.  Blue or green?  Who knows, but it is sorta refreshing 🙂

indoors it looks greenish

I stamped a Konad M35 bubble design on the tips to jazz it up a little bit!  I used an old AVON color called Foil Aluminum for my stamping.  I’m sure that Konad special polish would’ve stuck better to the surface of the nail….. but a girl can go crazy buying a zillion shades of special stamping polish!  I told myself that I was only allowed to buy the basic colors for stamping- black and white.  So for some silver bling… I just dug through my stash to find something opaque that might work- I think this avon color did the trick.

with flash it looks blue-ish!

Getting back to the wet n wild megalast- this line has what they call a ‘manicurve pro brush‘.  Because the brush was wide- I didn’t have to do multiple strokes to cover my nail.  I got a clean paint line along the base and edge of the nail without having to fuss too much.  On the flipside, I’m not sure if ladies with very petite nail beds would like this broad brush…it may accidentally bump into the cuticles?  But nothing about me is very petite … so I’m a fan of the manicurve!

Thanks for clicking! TGIF and happy nail painting….

I Need a Refresh-Mint

11/23/12–HERE’S A LITTLE UPDATE ON THIS POLISH: This megalast polish lasted forever!  I got a small chip on the 8th day, so I removed the polish on the 9th day.  I was super-impressed with it’s longevity.  This stuff rocks!! here’s my original post:

11/15/12– Isn’t this a cute name for a polish?  “I Need a Refresh-Mint” is part of the megalast line from wet n wild.   I was a little perplexed when I found it at the store- I couldn’t figure out why they named it mint-anything…. it really looked light blue to me under the fluorescents.  Blue or green?  Who knows, but it is sorta refreshing 🙂

indoors it looks greenish

I stamped a Konad M35 bubble design on the tips to jazz it up a little bit!  I used an old AVON color called Foil Aluminum for my stamping.  I’m sure that Konad special polish would’ve stuck better to the surface of the nail….. but a girl can go crazy buying a zillion shades of special stamping polish!  I told myself that I was only allowed to buy the basic colors for stamping- black and white.  So for some silver bling… I just dug through my stash to find something opaque that might work- I think this avon color did the trick.

with flash it looks blue-ish!

Getting back to the wet n wild megalast- this line has what they call a ‘manicurve pro brush‘.  Because the brush was wide- I didn’t have to do multiple strokes to cover my nail.  I got a clean paint line along the base and edge of the nail without having to fuss too much.  On the flipside, I’m not sure if ladies with very petite nail beds would like this broad brush…it may accidentally bump into the cuticles?  But nothing about me is very petite … so I’m a fan of the manicurve!

Thanks for clicking! TGIF and happy nail painting….

BROKEN NAIL DILEMMA – I’m taking a poll !

What do you do when one of your nails breaks?? You have one little stumpy nail while all the others are long n lovely!!!

This just happened to me tonite and I haven’t decided how to handle it. So I’m asking my fellow nail fanatics…what’s a girl to do??

Cut ’em all short? Paint a cool mani and pretend it didn’t happen?  Help me out ladies….I’d like to hear your thoughts !

wet n wild eggplant frost

wet n wild Eggplant Frost

This color feels like a throwback !  I must’ve owned a similar polish back in the early 90’s cuz I feel like a teenager again LOL. This wet n wild Eggplant Frost is from the wild shine collection and it’s an awesome deep royal purple.  I also painted my ring finger as an accent nail using kleancolor sugar coat.

Overall, I like the Eggplant Frost!  A polish like this is kinda hard to photograph since it has a lil bit of a chameleon effect going on.  In the light it shimmers some fierce blue, and in the shade it’s more of a dark purple.  I like that the pigments shift … it’s shiny & vampy… and it’s only 99 cents 🙂

 

blue shimmer in direct light

 

in the shade- with kleancolor Sugar Coat accent nail

Jade Holographic Polish

Jade Holographico – Sedução Rosa

This holographic nail polish is gorgeous!  It’s like rainbows in a bottle!  I picked up this Jade Holographico at www.ninjapolish.com when they had some kind of promotion.  They were sold out of most colors so I wound up getting this pink rose shade called Sedução Rosa.  The holographic effects are amazing… but on the down-side, the brush is kinda wide and squared off at the end so it was a little hard to apply.  And I had to do 3 coats for full opacity.  But the holo pay-off is great… so it was worth it!  Here’s a close-up….

I think I definitely need to pick up some more holographic polishes!  Anyone out there have a fave I should try ?