THE COLOR RUN 2012!

On Sunday, I ran in the happiest 5k on the planet - The Color Run!  This is a 5k for non-serious folks mostly; at each kilometer mark, you get splattered in colored powder.  :) Proceeds go to a different charity in each city, and proceeds for the Minnesota run went to the Open Your Heart foundation, which is pretty cool! 

So.  In the spirit of this race, I decided to try out a splatter mani.  :)  I started with 2 coats of Essie Blanc, then prepared my workspace.  Once my entire coffeetable was covered in grocery bags and I had my paper plate, drinking straws, and splattering colors of choice within arms reach, the fun began!!  The process for this mani is pretty simple: put a blob of polish on the paper plate, dip the straw in it (I turned the straw to the side a bit and kind of scooped some polish in to the straw to make it work), then blow a sharp blast of air through the straw, which is pointed at your finger.  Repeat with each of your splatter colors - I'm too lazy to grab the bottles and look at the exact color names, but I went with blue, pink, yellow, green, and purple.

To minimize the amount of cleanup you'll need to do, you can cover the skin around your fingers in scotch tape, but I did this on the first hand and decided it was too much work.  The splattered polish on my skin came off easily enough with a q-tip and some polish remover.

Bonus: me (and my friend Michelle) after the race!

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!

Crooked stripes....

Unfortunately, this mani makes it very clear that I need some striping brushes. I do absolutely love the colors though. I don't have all of them in front of me, but I know that the base coat is Essie Licorice, the purple stripes are China Glaze Gothic Lolita, the yellow is a super awesome neon glow-in-the-dark polish from Forever 21 (a gift from my mom), and the blue is Sinful Colors Aquamarine.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!!!

I'm Switzerland!!!!

Quick post before I get ready for the day - I have the rest of the week off work because I have a visitor in town!!

When I was in high school, an exchange student from Switzerland lived at my house for a year.  She's in town for a little while so here's what I did this morning in her honor:

Today's plan is to rent some Nice Ride bikes and scope out the food trucks in downtown St. Paul.  I hear there's one devoted to bacon, so this should be good!!  Thankfully, there is a Twitter feed dedicated to just food trucks: @tcstreetfood.

On Saturday one of my best friends is getting married - so stay tuned for more, since I'll most likely change my mani for that.  :)

Have a great week everyone!  Enjoy the sunshine!!!

Rrrrrrrrruffles!!!!

Chalkboard Nails did a great tutorial for ruffle nails - so that's how I spent my night last night.  9 different nail polishes, 3 episodes of Scrubs, Sally Hansen Quick Dry Top Coat, and a few spritzes of OPI Rapid Dry Spray later......

My apologies for the less-than-stellar image quality....I took this with my cell phone this morning.  Wanted to get a halfway decent photo of this before it chipped.  I had originally planned on applying each row of dots in a random color order, but the boyfriend decided it would be best to put them in the proper order.  :)

Anyways - OPI Rapid Dry Spray is my new favorite product.  It's been sitting around with the rest of my nail polish and up until this point I've only really used it on my toes.  This stuff works wonders!  My nails were dry to the touch (no nicks!) in 15 minutes.

Have a good weekend everyone!!

Pretty blue boxes!

I walked in to Ulta one day with the intent to find some Tiffany blue polish.  The closest I could find was more green than it should be - so I turned to Amazon once again and ordered China Glaze's For Audrey.  It's perfect!!  I just love those pretty blue boxes.  :)

(My apologies - I'm still working on getting the lighting right in these pictures....)

Accent nail is Nicole by OPI's Rainbow In The S-Kylie.

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!