Tag Archives: china glaze

Week 08: yellow

(Note: I got the May SquareHue: Madonna collection, but I hate it intensely, so I’m not even going to bother to swatch it. The Silver Nail did, however, and you can see her lovely pictures here.)

week 08: yellow

Ah, yellow. I love yellow, but it very definitely does not love me back. My ancestry is first-generation Portuguese (which in a perfect world would give me lovely olive-toned skin), and I-don’t-know-when-they-came-here Russian Ashkenazi, so the combination leaves me with cool-toned light skin that burns easily but then tans well. Or it would, if the weather would cooperate, but it’s been raining for four days. But what it really means is that while I love buttery pastel yellows and covet them in nail polish, they look pretty terrible on me. Sadface forever.

Click here to see more sunshine and a couple extra manis!

Spots for spring

Now that I’m into manicures, I polish my nails two or three times a week, mostly to avoid grading tests. Usually I just do a simple mani of a single color, but a couple of days ago I wanted to do something more exciting.

I intended to draw cherry blossoms again, but I'm really bad at them.

I intended to draw cherry blossoms again, but I’m really bad at them.

I used Zoya Angelina, a rich, cool-toned brown, China Glaze Keep Calm Paint On, a pistachio green with a subtle shimmer, and CG Pink-e Promise, a petal pink that looks much brighter in person than in the picture. I made the dots with a dotting tool.

Click here for another picture and another mani

Week 05: Inspired by a Song

05-song

I’m going to post this a day early, because I’m procrastinating my work. So, I didn’t exactly skip week 04: gradient. I took pictures before I went to visit my mother, but I failed to post on Sunday, and then, you know, I got distracted by events. And now that I’m back in MA, I realize I left my memory card at my mother’s. So. I’ll get back to that week another time; I did an ugly manicure anyway.

Click here to see my manicure inspired by a song!

Week 03: Spring

03-spring

This took me all morning and I’m not happy. I don’t even know.

I originally decided to do cherry blossoms for Spring. I started with butter London’s Hen Party, a delicate sheer cherry blossom pink shimmer, but I hate having my nail tips visible because I get so much stuff under my nails and it drives me nuts to see it. So I tried again with a base of Essie’s Where’s My Chauffeur? – a bright-hued light blue. Too bright. Then China Glaze’s Keep Calm and Paint On, but then it looked like an Arizona iced tea can. So I finally went with OPI’s My Vampire is Buff, with branches in acrylic paint and petals in SquareHue’s Wartime Romance and High School Crush (from February’s Vintage Love collection).

Click here to see two spring manicures

Week 01: Easter

01-easter

So Pintrest and YouTube and Instagram are full of ideas for Easter nails, but I wanted to keep things pretty simple. I love the look of polka-dot nails, so I went with a skittles mani in spring colors and simple dots. It didn’t take too long, since the dots weren’t fussy, and I like how it came out. I only photographed the one hand, but my right hand has the same base colors in a different order, and different colored dots, so they’re not exactly mirror images.

Click here to see the Easter-inspired nails