Happy 4th of July!

I am both incredibly happy and incredibly disappointed with this manicure.  Strange, I know.

(Reminds me of "Mood Rings" by Relient K - "She said to me that it's so happy it's depressing / and all I said was 'Someone, get that girl a mood ring.'"  It doesn't take much for a random song to pop in to my head....then I always have to listen to it.  Starting up the Two Lefts Don't Make a Right....But Three Do album now......)

I spent a fair amount of time on this last night, but I was rather impatient when waiting for each layer to dry, which means I have nicks, I have bits of blue polish that peeled up with the tape, and I have flooded my cuticles with topcoat.  All around, not my best work.  I also ran out of regular Scotch tape partway through and started using clear packing tape.  NOT ideal - the packing tape was much more sticky and pulled up the blue and some of the silver when I peeled it off.

BUT.  I do love the concept and I love the color combination (Sinful Colors Aquamarine, Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Silver Sweep, and Sinful Colors Ruby Ruby.)  The somewhat transparent red over the silver has a pretty cool effect.

(This, of course, reminds me of another song...."Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs.  Hope I have that one on my Zune or it's going to drive me nuts all night.)

Hope you all have a safe and happy 4th of July!

Copycat (kind of)

I have a confession to make.  I couldn't help myself.  Nailside has inspired me once again...this time I'm looking a bit more like a copycat. Amazon is quite an amazing thing when it comes to purchasing nail polish that you can't really find in stores - hence my recent purchase of OPI's Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ and China Glaze's Jitterbug.

Mrs. O'Leary's BBQ was not what I was expecting - it looks almost pink/purple tinted in the bottle.  Once you get two coats on your nails though, it's pretty close to being the color of BBQ sauce.  Very, very nice dark color.

Add a little bit of Scotch tape and one coat of Jitterbug, and we get this!

Angles

This week's inspiration comes from Nailside.  I've really been wanting to use China Glaze's Smoke & Ashes (from The Hunger Games collection) but it's much much too dark for my taste, especially with my fair skin.  It is a gorgeous color: a very dark black/blue base with some green/blue glitter.  You have to get rather close to see the glitter.

The base coat is Essie's Turquoise & Caicos - I love the color, but I had to put on three coats for it to come close to opaque.  I left it at the base coat for about 6 hours to make sure it had dried completely, then taped off a diagonal portion on each nail with scotch tape, then painted the tips with Smoke & Ashes.

I also picked up some Lemony Flutter Cuticle Butter at Lush last weekend - makes a huge difference and is really cutting down on hangnails (no pun intended)!