Pinspiration Nails

Being sick takes a lot out of me, so I'm excited to get back to some little projects here and there that I love so much! This week, I went with some more nails-- I found this pin a while back and I've wanted to try it out, and when I sat down to try it I of course decided to make it snazzy!

I chose the orange and blue because they were nice, vibrant colors but I didn't want too much of one or the other. So, here goes!

A sheet of hole protectors, your polish colors, and since I lost my top coat I just used the base coat twice.

Cut your hole protectors in half

Paint your base color on

I used Caliente Coral from Sephora by OPI

For the look I wanted, I put the stickers on about halfway up my nails

Paint over the entire nail with your contrast color (I used "Teal We Meet Again" from the same Sephora by OPI Collection)

I found it was easier to pull the stickers off immediately after painting-- unlike scotch tape, the paper on the hole protectors got a little soggy and messed up the bottom coat a bit

If you look at the thumb and pointer here, you'll see why it's important to push the stickers down all the way so you get a nice even edge!

These looked great and I got a LOT of compliments on them! The only funny thing was that the blue paint over the orange turned out greenish!! I'll definitely try the original Pinspiration soon, especially since I have some beautiful green shades to try and some time to kill with surgery coming up!

Emma Frost Nails

OK, this is an easy one, and was inspired by Emma Frost, first lady of the Hellfire Club (for my fellow geeks out there) and the sexy chick from "X-Men: First Class" (for my non-geeks out there) with the Diamond skin.

I was at CVS the other day and they had a sale and I had a coupon, so I thought this combination would be awesome!

The extremely white Sally Hansen InstaDry "White Out"

I really like this one because it puts on a smooth coat

And it's easy to clean up the edges since the polish legitimately InstaDries!

I covered it with Sally Hansen "Diamonds" which is why I decided these were Emma Frost nails :) 

It's been really hard to take a picture of this and get the full effect, but they were SHINY! I'm definitely using this one again for winter!

Materials Used: Sally Hansen InstaDry in "White Out" and Sally Hansen "Diamonds"

Cost: Generally inexpensive, but I did get everything on sale...

Time: 30 minutes all told-- the InstaDry is definitely my new favorite product!

Conclusion? I'd definitely do this again! I didn't have a bottom coat handy, so I'm going to try that next time since I think the "Diamonds" coat made things a little brittle, but it's definitely effective :) 

Dinosaur Eggs

(via)

I wanted to do these red and white nails sooooo bad but no such luck-- instead, I went for dino eggs! OK, so I know that dino eggs don't look anything like they did on the TV show Dinosaurs (yeeeeaaah 90's throwback whaaat!) but these nails remind me of dino eggs!!

The wraps base that I put on was a little wrinkly, so instead of doing the matte coat I decided to make it polka-dotty!

I'd wanted to do smaller polka dots, but since I didn't have a fine paint brush, I went with a q-tip 

Not too shabby!

The first dab will be light on paint in the middle, so just dab some more on after a second

Of course, it will take a few tries to get it looking right...

The finished product! Only one hand this time, a table managed to break half the nails off the other...

I've heard from a lot of reviewers that the matte coat will really show the flaws in your brush strokes, so since the base coat made mine majorly flawed I decided to do something fun! It is pretty funky and makes me smile, so I'll definitely do this again!

Products Used: Sally Hansen InstaDry Mint Sprint and Sephora coffee in NY

Time: About a half hour, all told. The Sephora paint went on a little thin so I had to do multiple layers. The InstaDry polish was PERFECT for this project with the dots!

Cost: I already had the InstaDry from the last project, and the Sephora teensy bottle was $1 on clearance, plus a q-tip which was probably worth about a penny and I had them laying around. Definitely a low-cost project!

Word of warning...

Those awesome blue nails that just went up? Yeah, this isn't really a real-time blog of any sort and so when I went to take the polish off a week later, I found this... 

(don't ask about the yellow, I STILL haven't figured that out!)

It may not be immediately evident, but my nails are stained blue... I'm going to try and be like Rick Astley and not give up on this, so that last picture is Sally Hansen's Hard As Wraps which is going on as my base coat this time around since I'm using another dark color. I'll keep you updated on that!

I'm Blue Dadadeedadada

So I swear I'm going to go to Michael's soon and start doing some Pinterest stuff that ISN'T just nails and food! But, for now, you get my "I wish it were summer so I could actually be at the beach seeing these colors" nail job as inspired by the Candy Cane Stripes I found via Pinterest from Chloe's Nails! I took Chloe's advice and tried Scotch tape to do the edging, and I have a few thoughts on that I'll share at the end-- for now, enjoy the process!

1. Scotch Tape rips up half the base polish on my thumb... it also leaves wavy lines. Perhaps I should cut it with scissors instead?

2. OK, put all the tape on at once so I don't have to fuss with doing each nail while another is wet

3. I cut all the tape with scissors and decided to use different kinds of stripes on each nail to see if I could get the barber pole effect-- make them look like the stripes were moving from nail to nail!

4. Oh, hey, look. I pulled off more...

5. But this time I tried pulling it off with tweezers and it worked a little better! The base coat was pulled but not all the way off and I was able to smooth it back down.

6. I did have a lot of problems with the tape stripping off itself and leaving small chunks behind; the tweezers came in handy here as well.

7. Here's what the first round looked like before fixes

8. A little bit sad, but not too shabby for a first go, right?

Here's the first hand finished product including a clear coat

Here's the second hand, finished product including top coat. 

As noted above, I think tweezers are a definite must have for this type of project-- the amount of fixing I had to do was insane! I did the bottom coat (Sally Hansen Capri Blue) on Sunday afternoon and had to do several layers-- probably four --to get the depth of color I wanted and I noticed a lot of that coming off on the scotch tape. The stripes coat was a Sally Hansen InstaDry type and I will be interested to see how "regular" polish behaves.

For next time, I think I will probably put a clear coat on over the base to keep that layer of color (no matter how small) from coming up and potentially protecting me from fixes. I'll also have fine tipped tweezers for those pesky left behind bits of tape.

All that being said, people were still blown away-- I actually held up the line at my hair salon because everyone wanted to see! Needless to add, the 5th grade girls at my after school program were ALSO impressed and stomped off pouting about how their mothers never let them do anything cool like that. I highly doubt that they have ever asked their mothers for scotch tape and nail polish!

I'm also considering doing something like this with those same girls at work, and to do so it would be much easier to have a stencil, so I'm going to work on making one out of index cards and I'll let you know how that goes!

Products Used: Sally Hansen Capri Blue, Sally Hansen InstaDry in Mint Sprint
Time: About a day all told-- I spent about four hours on the base coat to make sure I had the color I wanted and waited overnight to make sure it was dry enough, then cut up all the Scotch tape, painted them all again, then did the fixes, then did the clear coat... you get the point. BUT, I think in the future it will take less time!
Cost: Under $10 for both of them on sale. I'm all over the cheap polish, and I think I paid $4/ea or less. Plus, I'm definitely using them again!

Snap, CRACKLE, Pop

OK, let's be fair, really I just wanted to use the Rice Krispy slogan because nothing about this paint job reminds me of breakfast cereal and I didn't snap OR pop when I was done.

One of the great things about Pinterest, as you'll find out with this short post and the next (much more involved) post is that I feel a little more confident to try things I haven't tried before. I've never thought of myself as a "smokey eyes" gal or a "nail art" gal and when I saw a staff member with the crackle/shatter top coat last year I was blown away-- it looked SO COOL! But, Sam was a much more chic person-- she's several years younger (literally only several, though, I kind of sequester myself to old-ladydom since I'm married and run a child care center) and way more fashion forward than myself so I didn't think about it until I saw it on Pinterest again.

Then I saw this one:

(via)

And thought, "You know what, I run a child care center and it would be AWESOME to do this for Halloween!"

So, to start things out, I thought I'd go sorority-tastic and do a red and white combo since I thought it would be the least loud combination I could come up with to start myself out. I happen to think it turned out alright!

Of course, for the next week I was craving peppermint bark, but my cool points went up infinitely with the 2-5th grade girls!

Products Used: Sally Hansen Snow Blast Crackle Overcoat, Sinful Colors Professional in Ruby Ruby
Time: Minimal-- an hour or two, which is long for nails but not for nail ART! (ha) I do suggest letting the bottom coat dry for a while if it's significantly darker. I noticed a little red coming off on my white, so I waited an hour and didn't have that problem.
Cost: About a $10 up front investment since I got them both on sale, but I'll definitely use both colors again, probably at Christmas :)