Blue Blasted Nails

 

Check out my blue crackle nails!  I’m wearing my most-used nail polish my base- AVON Orange Creamsicle.  I can’t even count the number of times I’ve used this orange for nail art on this blog.  Then I topped it with a thin coat of Sephora by OPI’s crackle nail polish (they call their crackle line BLASTED) in Electric Blue Blasted.  The blue and orange combo looks rad together!  I’m also very impressed with the formula of sephora’s blasted.  It’s not as thick and clumpy as other brands and application was easy.  I also love the way it crackled.  Win!  Now I’m wondering what other colors to pair under this blue.  What do you think would look nice?  A light purple maybe?

Solar Eclipse Nails for #NAILLINKUP

Did you see the solar eclipse this morning?  I missed it!  We had daylight savings in the U.S. this morning too, which gave me an excuse to sleep in wayyy later than normal.  🙂

After deciding to make SOLAR ECLIPSE one of our themes for the November NAIL Linkup– this idea came to me rather quickly!  It’s an easy design too, which is always nice when you’re trying to squeeze nail challenges into your busy life schedule.

Each nail shows the different phases of the sun during an eclipse!  I did imagine the design different in my head though.  I’m surprised I was only able to fit 3 suns on each nail.  I imagined it with at least four suns, but oh well.  I need to face the fact that I don’t have long nails anymore!  lol

This manicure was simple simple simple!   I started with 2 coats of Brigits Digits called Witching Hour, a nice dark vampy holographic maroon color.  I just tried it out recently, but I’ve really been itching to wear it again since 1-Fall is great for deep mysterious colors like this and 2- now that my nails are shaped different I’m finding that I love to play with darker colors!  After my Witching Hour was in place I did 3 orange dots on each nail using AVON Creamsicle.  You may have noticed that I use that orange all the time, but for reals–AVON cream polishes are perfect for nail art!  To make the orange dots look like eclipses I just overlapped another dot over top using Witching Hour to partially cover the suns.  So basically, each nail has five dots on it.  How easy is that?

I enjoyed this look for a day, then I wanted to try mattifying it.  Matte topcoat makes holos look cool!  It brings out all the little flecks hidden in there!

Brijits Digits Witching Hour with MASH Matte Topcoat

I hope to see some fun SOLAR ECLIPSE manis as part of the Nail Art Ideas Linkup.  There’s so much room for interpretation with this one.  You could do suns, moons, galaxies, skies… whatever strikes your fancy!  Here are the other SOLAR ECLIPSE manis in the collection:

Solar Eclipse :

Reeses Pieces Nails!

The theme for Nail Art Ideas Linkup this week is TREATS AND SWEETS.  This time of year I think of trick or treating- and aaaahhh those lovely little bite-size candy bars and single-serving packs of candy!!  When I was a kid I remember dumping out all my halloween candy on the floor and I’d gauge how successful the night was based on how many chocolate and peanut butter treats I had.  If I had 6 or more full-size peanut butter cups then I hit the motherload!!!  Throw a bunch of mini snickers on top of that and I’m in heaven.  Chocolate and peanut butter- I LOVE YOU.

Well, since I love PB so much I felt inspired to do some Reese’s Pieces nails!  Check me out!

My cream-colored nails were easy to do- I made some some simple dots with a large dotting tool- hopefully the dots look like little Reese’s Pieces!  I also wanted to spell out the word REESE’S.  But I thought it would be hard to paint directly on my nails so I painted the word on a plastic baggy instead and made my own peel-off DIY decals.   Here’s an example of how I’ve done DIY decals in the past: Hunger Games Mockingjay Nails.  The word REESE’S came out kind of long and a bit too-stretched out to fit on one nail, so I had to snip the word into three segments.  This allowed me to span the word across three of my nails.  If you apply a decal like this on top of tacky or still-wet nail polish then it will stick pretty well.  Unfortunately I got some bubbles at the end when I applied my seche topcoat.  But it still looks cool and I guess the bubbles aren’t too noticeable.

Here’s a list of what I used

base coat ♥ Sally Hansen Maximum Growth

off-white ♥ Fresh Paint Coconut

bright orange ♥ Zoya Paz

light orange ♥ AVON Orange Creamsicle

bright yellow ♥ Sinful Colors Pull Over

light yellow ♥ Butter London Cheeky Chops

brown ♥ Sinful Colors Nirvana

top coat ♥ Seche Vite

I also had to add this cute prop to my photo.  Reese’s Pieces were one of E.T.’s fave snacks in the movie, right?  Well, check out my authentic E.T. movie stickers from 1982!  It’s hard to believe that I held on to these for 31 years!  I’m only 36 right now so I’ve been in possession of these stickers most of my life.  Crazy, right?  Here’s a little movie trivia for you- I just read that the movie production company wanted E.T. to eat M&M’s instead, but the Mars brand turned them down on the free product placement.  Their second choice was Hershey’s… who said YES, of course.  That’s why E.T. was always munching on Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces.  Apparently, Reese’s Pieces sales skyrocketed after the movie was released!  Who woulda thought an alien would persuade us to eat more candy like that?

I hope you like my Reese’s Pieces nails!!  Feel free to create your own TREATS AND SWEETS mani, or try out any of the other October NAIL themes!  The links are open all month:

Breast Cancer Awareness :

Autumn Trees :

Things That Go Bump in the Night :

Treats and Sweets :

Hallow E’en :

Abstract Fall Leaves based on a tutorial

First I wanna say that there’s only about two hours left to enter my giveaway!  Get your free entries in right here!  Sometime tomorrow I will announce the winners via email, and I’ll put out a blog post too.  Can’t wait to pick the winners!  Good luck everyone!

The prompt for week 2 of October’s Nail Art Ideas Linkup is Autumn Trees.  I’ve had so many great ideas for this theme and decided on an abstract leaf design that MrCandiipants came up with.  You can see her youtube tutorial here.  Someone commented on the vid and said that the design looks a little weird on square nails- so I wasn’t sure how I would pull this one off!  Then yesterday, I had a major nail snafu on my thumb!  I had to file the side of my thumb nail way down after a section of it cracked off.  😦  I was being a scaredy-pants but I managed to file my nail to a semi-stilletto shape to disguise the break.  It came out great!  I loved the way my pointy nail looked!  So I did my other thumb too just for spits and giggles.  I’m really contemplating making all my nails stilletto.  But get real Jac…. who am I kidding?  I won’t have the guts!  But my new thumbnail shape is a great reason for me to try out MrCandiipant tutorial now.  Well, on two nails at least.  So here we go!

I used a variety of colors for the leaf design…and it was a little hit and miss.  I changed my mind a few times and in the end I wound up using similar shades to what Candiipants used.  Here’s a list of my colors:

dark orange ♥ Art Orange from AVON

light orange ♥ Orange Creamsicle from AVON

yellow ♥ Inspire from AVON

green ♥ Limelight from Ulta

teal ♥ Read my Palm from Sephora by OPI

black ♥ Liquid Leather China Glaze

Is it okay that I only did my thumbs?  I really didn’t know how to make the design look nice on my other square nails… so the others are painted nice and simple with Kalahari Kiss.  I’ve been dreaming of getting Kalahari Kiss for a while now…. and when I recently placed an order on Cherry Culture I had to add this one to my cart.  That site sells China Glaze real cheap!  I think it was $3.99 and I had a discount code so I made out like a bandit!  Kalahari Kiss is one of those fugly kinda colors… but I’m so glad I got it.  It’s versatile, smooth and opaque and will be very handy for nail art I think.   Believe it or not, I only needed one coat for this mani.

Here are the other prompts for October.  Join in whenevs!

30th Sept – 6th Oct Breast Cancer Awareness :

7th-13th Oct Autumn Trees :

14th-20th Oct Things That Go Bump in the Night :

21st-27th Oct Treats and Sweets :

28th Oct – 3rd Nov Hallow E’en :

Day 7 of the OMD Challenge- Teal Holo Splash!

It’s day 7 of the Oh Mon Dieu! It’s the Rather Awesome 31 Day Challenge Giveaway!  Woot woot!  The theme is HOLO so day 7 is all about holographic nail polish.  I don’t know why, but I had the darnedest time coming up with a design on my own for this one!  So I asked the boyf to pick two colors.  He said blueish teal and orange- I think he said it’s Aquaman’s colors or something and he thought it would look summery? IDK.  But once I had those two colors picked out then the design just  kinda happened…  I’m calling it a splash design.  I think it came out awesome!  I don’t wanna take it off!  Can I please wear it a lil longer?  Pretty please…..

To start off I’ve got two coats of L.A. Girl Teal Dimension.  I cannot say enough good things about these la girl 3D Effects holos!  I use them a lot and they are just amazing!  The formula on this one was great.. nice and smooth and covered well with two coats.  Then I made three orange dots on each nail using a large dotting tool and AVON Orange Creamsicle.  I hope y’all don’t mind that I use the same polishes over n over again!  Then I took a skinny but stiff nail art brush and dragged down lines of polish in a sweeping motion to make the splashes come to a point.  I can’t believe how easy and clean they came out!  I hope you like it too!  It’s one of my faves designs now.  Don’t be surprised if I incorporate more of these splashes into my future nail designs.  They would make good flower petals too!  ~Long live Aquaman!~

View the other holo nail designs here:

7. Holo :

My guest post at Dizzy Little Digits- Dental Floss Nail Art!

Hey nail fans!! Denise (the bloggerista behind Dizzy Little Digits) is in Ireland right now and I am so happy to put this manicure together for her blog while she’s away.  I created this Irish-inspired look using dental floss!  Have you ever tried that technique out before?  If you want to find out more please view my guest post at Dizzy Little Digits!!

If you don’t already follow Denise’s blog- you will love it!  She posts a lot and she always has the cutest nail art designs!  So please check her out or find her on bloglovin!

Have a great day!

Rainbow Nails and my gradient technique!

Today’s nails were inspired by my inner child!  When I was a little girl (back in the 80’s) I just loved rainbows!  Rainbow stickers, rainbow spiral notebooks, rainbow earrings… pretty much anything that had a rainbow on it caught my attention.  Too bad it took me 30+ years to discover this rainbow gradient technique!  Well, this mani is dedicated to you, little Jacqui from the 80’s!  I know you would’ve loved these nails. 🙂

My first attempts at gradients were total fails- until I came up with this very effective way of using makeup sponges.  Here’s a pic of how I use my sponge for a gradient:

I start out with a standard cosmetic application wedge and use sharp scissors to cut it into 4 or 5 long skinny pieces.  I take one of the pieces, fold it in half, and dab it into a drop of nail polish on my work surface.  Then I sponge it onto my nail to create the gradient effect.  I think these folded over sponge strips work well since their surface is slightly curved, yet small-so you can dab, dab, dab away to get the paint just where you want it.  I use a different sliver of sponge for each color.  The small surface area of the sponge worked great to get the skinny lines of color for today’s rainbow gradient… but it also works well for a larger-scale gradient (like this leopard design where I only sponged on one color).  I think this technique is less messy and it’s fool-proof!!  I haven’t screwed up one gradient yet since I started doing it this way !

WHITE BASE ♥ one coat of Sally Hansen Teflon Tuff in French White Tip

RED ♥ Zoya Carmen

ORANGE ♥ AVON Orange Creamsicle

YELLOW ♥ AVON Inspire

AQUA ♥ Wet n wild I Need a Refresh-mint

PURPLE ♥ Nicole by OPI I’m a Belieber

This mani makes me happy on this beautiful friday!!

Do you love rainbows as much as me??