Christmas Nails-Round 2

As I hoped, I have two more winter/holiday nail designs for you today. They didn't come out as well as I wanted, so now, one day before Christmas, I'm still in search of my elusive Christmas day nails. 

First I tried some ruffian stamping, with mixed results. Even though the photos on this design weren't fantastic, I really liked it on my nails. I used Sally Hansen Hard as Nails in Pumping Iron as my base, then created a curved side ruffian with Julep Lacey. I stamped the cute little snowflakes with Pumping Iron as well. This mani gave me a few issues, but I think the overall result wasn't bad and I enjoyed wearing it. On the downside, I had tip wear at breakneck speed, which you can see here. This photo is only a day into wearing this mani. Silvers tend to give me that issue, so I was disappointed even if not surprised. I did try a new topcoat, Sally Hansen Super Shine. It was slightly slower drying than my standby topcoats, but otherwise a good substitute-easy to work with and quite shiny.

Here's my second look, the one I'm wearing now. It falls strictly into the realm of "ok I guess," to the point that I'm marking it as a fail. I'm just not in love with it. The color combination is great, though. This is NYC Crown Gold with Fashion Queen on the tips, then Sally Hansen Insta Dri Wined Up for my tree and ribbon and NYC Queen of the City and Fashion Queen for the bow.

*Sigh*. Not good. But I'm still dreaming up that mani that will make me squeal when I wake up to it on Christmas morning. Wish me luck!

Butterfly Nail Stamping and Lakeside Gradient

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've been feeling quite uninspired. Lots of very simple manis and nail fails searching for the look I want that day. I've continued to post NOTD pics on Facebook and Twitter, but nothing has seemed...blogworthy.

However, the show must go on! The look I have for you today is what I call a "lakeside gradient" because the colors I chose reminded me of the blue green of autumn lake water and cool, wet sand. It's not a bright, summery gradient, but it still reminds me of the beach. Over the top I stamped a simple butterfly image from a Kiss Nails stamping kit. The stamper itself and scraper fell to the bottom of my nail box quickly in favor of my usual Born Pretty Store double sided stamper and an old gift card, but the plates are full of cute designs and work pretty well. The butterflies don't really fit my lakeside theme, but I thought they were pretty, and I do what I want. :)

Aren't these colors something? The blue is Nicole by OPI in Goodbye Shoes from the Carrie Underwood collection, a mellow greyish blue creme. For my sandy gradient accent, I used a base color of Julep Cynthia and gently sponged Goodbye Shoes along the tips. As rich as it is, Goodbye Shoes is a two coater that's thin enough to create a decent gradient, even on a much lighter color. It's all topped with Glisten and Glow HK Girl topcoat.

The stamped butterflies are A England Sleeping Palace, possibly my very favorite polish ever. Oooh! Ahhh!

Hopefully my blogger's block will clear up soon. I've been itching to do something really epic, I just haven't been hit by the right inspiration yet. Ideas welcome! Comment, or send them to me on Twitter at @SecretNailBlog.

Shaping, Stars, And Chevrons

An item referenced in this post was provided to me. 

Since I've started to get more comfortable with cleanup, I've been thinking more about the other end of the nail: tip shaping. I'm not even close to the even, perfect-ish shaping I want, but I thought I'd share my progress and some of my thoughts and challenges on the subject.

My current "squovals"

I think I've worn all of the "traditional" nail shapes for natural nails at one point or another-I hate to admit it, but it's been more by accident than out of an adventurous spirit. Shaping is more of a panic response to a break than a conscious choice. When my nails get long, I'm reluctant to chop them down for the sake of shape, but refusing to lose any length on some nails sacrifices the overall look. When you look at bloggers like Sam at The Nailasaurus and Sarah at Chalkboard Nails, who have short nails with clean, defined shapes, though, there's hope! Sam has squared nails that look clean and elegant, and make a great canvas for nail art, while Sarah's are rounded, which looks soft and feminine even when she's wearing them short. Alternately, Gnarly Gnails has a more fluid shape-sometimes square, sometimes almond, sometimes pointed...so much fun! I'm not quite confident enough in my shaping skills yet to make drastic changes. 

L to R: Pointer to ring

Where I run into issues is that my natural nail shape varies from nail to nail. My nails seem to move more toward round the closer I get to the thumb, with my pointer finger being quite rounded and prone to breaks and my ring finger being almost insistently squared. As you can see, even with the progress I've made with shaping (just look at my older posts), the natural tendencies of my nails are hard to overcome without aggressive filing, and my poor nails aren't quite ready for that. I think with a little research and confidence, one day my nails may have that polished (haha) look I crave. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of having natural nails is missing out on that manufactured look and the versatility of changing your nail shape like you change your polish.

By the way, did you see this polish!? The star is Pahlish Raggedy Man Good Night. It's a sparkly grey in regular light, but in the sun it lights on fire. Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Gone Grey, which is gorgeous on its own too, is the base for this mani. I've worn it under a white holo as well, and it gives a nice, solid foundation that really brings out the best in my holo polishes. After being a little underwhelmed with it on its own, I layered Raggedy Man over black, red, deep purple, and this grey, and this was the clear winner (though the red was interesting too, and definitely worth another look sometime). I accented with my first chevrons, which came out really well. I took my Nailed It chevron vinyl decals and overlayed them on my ring finger, then painted over the whole deal with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Black Out (Summer also has ready made black decals if you'd prefer a no-fuss approach). The vinyl decals left great, crisp lines when I pulled them off with tweezers-easy! I also used Black Out to stamp some stars for a fun mani in a muted more-than-meets-the-eye palette.

What shape are you wearing right now? Which one do you want to try? 

Ode to Orange

My quest for the perfect coral has reminded me how much I love orange polish. Despite my disappointment with uber-orange Mariska, orange based polishes tend to play well with my skin tone and make up the right mix of unexpected and classy for summer nails. Here are a few of my recent orange loving manis.

My most recent orange mani is a playful daisy design inspired by Robin Moses' tangerine daisy accent nail art. I took a more abstract take, using a small dotting tool to shape my messy orange and white daisies. The daisies and the primary color in my mani is Julep Ingrid, a cheerful all-season burnt orange. The base on my accent nail is Julep Florence, with Julep Nessa, Sally Hansen Triple Shine State-mint, a generic Sally Hansen french tip white, and Revlon Jaded Night as the other colors for my daisies.






This one isn't exactly orange-this is my standby Nantucket red, Julep Nan. Nan is a color I just love. The terracotta red shines on its own, but the right partner brings out Nan's burnt orange undertone. I stamped with Revlon Foxy for an understated, slightly shimmery all over pattern.

I'm in love with coral this summer, and Sinful Colors' Boogie Nights was the clear favorite on a recent binge. It looks bright orange in the bottle, but the undertone is sweet and slightly pinky rather than loud. This mani was inspired by Chalkboard Nails "Fizzy French" nail art with OPI's Coke collaboration polishes. Boogie Nights was bright enough to keep the original spirit of the mani, with this playful tangerine influenced coral rather than Coke can red. I used Glitter Gal Turbulence for holo glitter dots in place of the metallic silver "bubbles."







Finally, I went back to the well with a sparkly gradient, using Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Peach of Cake and NYC Color Top O' The Gold topcoat for gold flakie tips. I don't have very many CSM colors, but I like their cremes a lot-very smooth and well pigmented. This color is a bit of a chameleon. In low lights and sunlight, it's very subdued. Under florescents, the orange really pops! It ranges from a pastel to a neon depending on the light. Here I wore two coats.

Any polish junkie knows that 'orange' is a very subjective term when it comes to polish. A nontraditional red, coral, peach, or even copper or apricot are all in the right family to offer the same punchy variation on the usual colors as straight orange polishes. What's your favorite "orange"?

My First Leadlight Nail Art

Always late to the party, I saw some leadlight nail art pop up in my Bloglovin' feed and I lost my mind. For those of you who are like me and have to be hit in the face before you notice a trend, leadlighting is when you stamp a design over a white or light background, then use jelly or sheer colors to give a watercolored or stained glass type look to your nail art, like the recent floral (yay florals!) post from ProcrastiNails. I tend to strongly prefer opaques over sheers, leaving the sheer polishes that find a way into my collection to languish. This is a great way to put them to work, and greatly increased my appreciation for sheer polishes.

For this design, I used Sally Hansen XTreme Wear White On underneath and Black Out for my stamping. I used sponging instead of a dotting tool with my sheer polishes for a less defined, hazy gradient. NYC Color Precious Peacock (I was SO disappointed when that one was sheer!), Sinful Colors Purple Diamond, and Wet N' Wild Megalast Retro Mint filled in the design, with Sinful Colors Mint Apple as my main mani color (yes, I bought more Sinful Colors polishes, shut up).

What do you think? I'm still doing some trial and error, and I'm interested in trying the more defined technique like the one in the Messy Mansion leadlight tutorial, but I've been happily sporting this mani for several days- that never happens! I think now I need more stamping plates.

Sinful Colors Binge-Conclusion

When we last left our heroine (me), I had picked up three Sinful Colors polishes and was delightedly testing all of them. First round was a bejeweled ruffian with Endless Blue. Next, I posted my simple  Rise & Shine nail look to Twitter, using another polish I picked up the same day, NYC Top of the Gold topcoat. My favorite, though, has definitely been the look I ended up with when I busted out Nice Stems.

I initially described Nice Stems as a soft mint green, which is what it looked like when I initially tried it on. I don't know if it's just the color combo I used or the lighting when I first tried it, but in this mani, it has more of a Tiffany blue color-very unusual for a polish I would have described as leaning toward jade a few days ago! As a companion, I used Julep Gayle and simply inverted the colors for my accent nail. Nice Stems stamps reasonably well, and both colors are muted enough that they compliment rather than clash.

The adorable bird "print" is probably familiar to you from my tattoo themed stamping mani. Today's design was inspired by an adorable Lylia Rose swallow scarf. Lylia Rose has the most adorable, interesting items both on the website and the Etsy shop, but she's UK based, which has made me less inclined to buy all 200 items that I want. I don't like to wait, plus I'm not sure what shipping will cost from the UK, so I want to wait until my budget allows a bigger order all at once. While I wait, I steal her product themes for nailspiration.




I'm still pretty pleased with my Sinful Colors choices, and can't wait to try more. Dream On...Gogo Girl...Mint Apple...Cream Soda...continuing the hunt for the elusive Rainstorm...I feel obsession coming on.

Messin' with the Plie Wand

As a Julep Maven, this month I came into possession of their newest and much hyped product, the Plie Wand. I'm going to say up front that it was through the kindness of an abundance of crowdfunders that I have this product, because I didn't pre-order it. Even after watching the video, reading the blog post, and viewing the Facebook posts about it ranging from rabid enthusiasm to 'yawn,' I was unenthused about what it can do for me. I'm used to painting my nails, and now that my cleanup skills have improved, I don't worry as much about precision polishing. While I can't say I'm overwhelmingly converted to the camp that this is a must have product, I've played with it a little, and it's pretty cool I guess.

First I tried it for painting my toenails, which is the only reason I was particularly interested in the Plie Wand at all. It passed that test. Painting my toes was much more comfortable with the Plie Wand and looked much less like a 3 year old did it. Then I tried it on my fingernails. Julep compared it to spending your whole life writing with a pen the size of the cap, then being handed a whole pen. Mmm, not exactly. It felt more like trying to color with a crayon stretched to the shape of a pencil. Just not quite right. I can see how the bendy stem would be great for people with limited control due to arthritis, Parkinson's, or other conditions that impact hand control, though. Since I have pretty steady hands, it was more a hindrance than a help to me. But then I started striping.

I officially LOVE the Plie Wand for striping, precisely because it is like holding a pen. For painting it was in the way, but for striping it was perfect. Julep markets the Plie Wand as something to use with Julep polishes, includes a regular size precision brush (it has slightly shorter bristles than a regular Julep brush) that can be used with any polish. They sell a striper/dotter add on kit, but I already had a frayed Julep polish brush that I'd cut down into a thin striper. I pulled the overcap off and popped the brush into the Plie cap. It's a nail art dream.

I started to get a little mad when I couldn't get my carefully cultivated striper out of the wand, though. Ack! How did I forget the negative review on the website that the wand eats brushes and you can't get them out?! It didn't give me any trouble before, and now my striper's stuck? So annoying! I yanked with my tweezers. I tugged. I wiggled. I pulled. The inner cap wouldn't budge. Then it hit me that Julep had built in a simple feature to the Plie Wand for exactly this situation.

Instead of a solid cap, the removable magnetic cap that snaps on to the Plie Wand has a hole in the top. I'd noticed it, but didn't give a second thought to why they'd done it. Now I know. I pushed an orangewood stick through the hole, and my cap popped right out. The Plie Wand was restored to favored status for my precision nail art needs.

The colors used for this stamped French tip look were Sally Hansen XTreme Wear White On, Julep Caitlin for the hearts, and Essie A Cut Above for the stripe (I'm learning that there is no imperfection that glitter can't improve).

Oh, I almost forgot- I wouldn't be a very good Maven if I didn't show you my polishes. This month, I went Bombshell. Laree and Saaya were colors I had to have. Laree is a gold shimmer infused pink, while Saaya is a subdued yellowish apricot-more yellow than I expected, which was a minus for me, but I still think I like it. I instantly thought they'd make a beautiful gradient, and I was right! I also stamped these, using Julep Nellie. The downside: my tips chipped almost immediately, and the polish popped off in sheets the next day. I haven't played with them enough to see if this is going to be an issue or if I just laid down a bum base coat that day or something. I put Laree on my daughter sans basecoat, and her manicure actually lasted longer than usual, so the jury is still out. Laree has also replaced my go-to Nan on my toes with no issues. Hopefully it was a fluke, because Laree is a lovely summer pink, and I don't have anything else like Saaya. Mavens, what did you think of this month's collection? Is the Plie Wand a must have or a skip? Any polish problems?

Stamping For Beginners

As you may know, I recently started stamping, and I'm pretty happy about that. It was a calculated risk, because I'm not exactly the most coordinated gal, but I've had some success with it. I'm a natural researcher, so while I waited impatiently for my kit to arrive, I must have looked at 50 tutorials. Last weekend I did some simple flower stamping, and that process made me think about the things a new stamper might want to know.

First, here are some great resources:
Lacquer or Leave Her's Nail Stamping 102 post is fantastic. I tend to prefer a wordier blog style with lots of pictures (nooo! really?), and this post both shows and tells the process clearly and gives some great tips on what polish brands stamp well.

For those of you who are more step by step picture people, Nail Art 101 (who I love, by the way) have a good visual step-by-step with a few tips thrown in at the end.

Finally, for our audio-visual learning types, this video from Elleandish hits the basics in 4 minutes or less. She's using a stamper almost identical to mine, which was cheap and works great.

I've also started picking up a few of my own best practices for nail stamping. In the images here, I'm wearing Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Going Grape and stamped with Sally Hansen Hard As Nails in Pumping Iron. I usually shoot for more opaque polishes to stamp, but I wanted a more subtle, faded look to compliment Going Grape's amazing duochrome effect. Robin Sparkles shows how well metallics can look in a stamping design in her Valentine's design video. Here are my own tips for those of you in the same boat as me:

- For me, one of the challenges has been figuring out what colors to use together. Black and white are always winners, but try colors in the same family for an elegant effect, like a dark green over seafoam or deep aubergine over lilac.
-Stamping is a great way to get mileage out of thickened polishes, too- thicker polishes stamp really well. For more pronounced designs, every black and white I've tried have worked fine, and Julep cremes have worked well, too-Gayle stamps like a dream.
-Roll the stamper all the way across the nail rather than trying to dab on the design. I'm constantly half stamping, so be careful about that.
-Sometimes I use more than one design and stamp twice on different parts of the same nail to make a look that's all mine.
-Finally, I always use a thick coat of quick dry topcoat before stamping. Then if I mess up, I swipe a q-tip dabbed in acetone over the design and almost never have to redo the whole nail, even if it takes two or three tries. Seal it all in with another layer of topcoat, and you've got it.

Isn't Grape Going fabulous? I'm falling madly in love with Sally Hansen duochromes. What stamping techniques have you picked up, and which stamping looks do you still covet? What polishes are made for stamp art?

Gradient Practice

I've expressed my love for glitter gradients before, and lit up Twitter with googly eyes over the Nailasaurus gradient tutorial, but my own non-glitter gradient technique hasn't quite found its rhythm yet. This week I practiced my gradients, and while it's still not perfect, I've made a little progress.

I started with a sparkly pink gradient that came out much better than I thought it would. I used two Sally Hansen Hard as Nails in Champagne and Sally Hansen Diamond Strength in Rose Amore. Rose Amore is the perfect opacity and consistency for gradients, but Champagne wasn't a great match as far as texture, especially since it was an older bottle. The colors worked nicely together, though. Coming off of a massive fail on an ambitious attempt at the coveted nude/midnight blue gradient, the discovery that a dab of Champagne on the ends made a beautiful shifting gradient was a happy accident.




My second gradient didn't come out very well, even when I threw glitter at it- and I thought glitter could salvage anything. For this one I used two new colors (well, one new and one just new to me): Sally Hansen Insta Dri in Quick Sand and NYC In A Minute in Robin's Egg Blue. I've not been crazy about the In A Minute polishes I've tried because of the thin formula, but I figured this would make them fabulous for gradients, which was true. This one just didn't work out well, even with a sparkly ribbon of Julep Joelle to try to smooth out the look.

The last gradient is the one I was the happiest with. This round, I followed the Nailasaurus method faithfully. I gave Robin's Egg Blue another shot with a favorite, Sally Hansen Insta Dri in Lively Lilac. Robin's Egg Blue looked mint green in the store, and I still think it's too greenish for the name, but it's quite nice, which I couldn't tell so much in the other gradient. It is thin, so excuse my smudgy cleanup. I finished it out with a floral stamp (from plate to-12 at the link) using Julep Gayle, which stamps wonderfully.

I still need some practice before I can get the flawless gradients I crave, but we're off to a good start!

Weekend Nails: My First Stamping Adventure

My first stamping kit arrived this week! After 6 weeks of waiting, I had scared myself a little bit-had I waited all this time and ordered all this stamping stuff only to discover that I'm not coordinated enough to stamp? Luckily, after a few practice rounds earlier this week, I can report that I'm happy with my results for my first attempt.

I love the old Sailor Jerry style of tattooing, so I was pleased to find these adorable sparrows on a stamping plate. This color scheme is based on one of my own tattoos, with the gradient nails mix and matched from the other designs on this playful plate.

My ink-spiration

For the other hand, I played with freehand lettering, paying homage to myself and my sweetie with our first initials.

For this design, I used Nicole for OPI Naturally with Julep Maren as a sheer topper, Sally Hansen XTreme Wear in Blue Me Away, and stamped with Sally Hansen XTreme Wear in White On and Black Out. Stamping isn't nearly as difficult as I feared, though you do have to be fast, which I typically am not. I put a quick dry topcoat over my polish before stamping as well, to both prevent smudges and allow me to get away with gently wiping off the design if it didn't come out well. I'm happy with the result, and with practice I'll get better.

Now that you've seen my mani, look at all my stuff!

TEN stamping plates! Six striping tapes! Five pages of stickers and decals! French tip guides! I went nuts. Shipping takes foreeeever, but the Born Pretty Store prices are fantastic, and I'm very happy with the quality of the products. I also got decals this week from Nailed It Decals for a great NOTD design, and picked up a new polish that I think will be a surprise favorite. I officially have more inspiration than I know what to do with!