Sweet Baby Octopolish!

I've been blogging here for 9 years now (what?!) and it's fascinating to look back at my first pics and see what a difference practice and skill has made over time.  I found myself having the same conversation twice with friends in the past week about nail care for specifically "our" type of nails, so I figured since I have research, opinions, and things that work I might as well write it down for anyone else who'd find it useful! bare nails here, prepped with nothing but oil First off, your nail type: Fingernails are just like hair - sheets of keratin produced by growth centers -  and just like hair, we have different types & textures.  In the same way there's a million brands and types of shampoo specifically intended to improve your hair type, you need to select products that match your nail type.  Some folks have hard, thick nails.  Some have flexible or even oily-textured nails.  I happen to have very thin, weak nails that will peel apart in layers...

 I love themed nail art looks, so holidays are a real must-do for me (despite not actually celebrating several of them).  We're still missing out on community fireworks this year, but there's always room for a red, white, and blue mani this time of year, and I can always use an excuse to bust out the fluid art polish. indoor, bright CF lighting Baroness X is the undisputed queen of fluid nail art polishes, going beyond mere basic colors (though she has those too) and adding some unique elements to this technique.  Snow Leopard is a neutral, creamy white that happens to also have some translucent shimmer mixed in. outdoor, bright direct daylight There are tons of youtube videos that show how to create fluid art cells, but here's the short version for those of you that prefer text to video.  First off, select a fluid art polish - this won't work without one - and then pick some contrasting colors to go with it.  More contrasty colors make the cells pop.  In t...

I've been having fun playing with nail art challenge prompts lately, but one that stumped me from the start was simply the color orange.  Orange and yellow are just not my jam, and I have only a small amount of either specifically for nail art.  Pondering that reminded me I'd picked up an orange crème polish late last year in case of Halloween needs, and a google images search gave me plenty of ways to make orange more appealing to me . bright afternoon sunlight For a first attempt after watching this inspo video , which had a gorgeous look but no how-to pointers, I absolutely love how this came out. indoor, bright CF lighting On my stamper head, I've dry brushed first in Flormar Coral Red, which is neither of those things, but instead a bright sunny orange crème.  After that, there's a few swipes of Dance Legend Triumph, a dusty navy jelly with holo flake.  Finally, I lightly covered the whole thing with one coat of a medium aqua shimmer polish. brig...

Sometimes there's that one polish, even in a collection full of jewels, that just draws everyone's attention like bees to honey.  KBShimmer released a slew of utterly beautiful multichrome magnetics earlier this year, and a whole lot of the buzz went straight to Solar Flair, both because it was the LE out of the group and for its uniquely fiery look.  I originally passed on this one, thinking it was too yellow & orange, but the consistently stunning swatch pics I came across convinced me otherwise. Y'all, the hype is real . indoor, CF lighting You see how there's 2/3 of a rainbow in that bottle?  Deep carmine red straight on, that tilts to burnt orange, then a hint of coppery gold, and finally peridot green that's reaching toward blue around the curve of the bottle?  And how all of those colors come right on out on the nail, left to right, from pinky over to index on that bottle shot above?  Yup.  Shifty AF IRL, no special tricks require...

Last year, Dance Legend released a handful of colors in their Spot It line that were supposed to cause cool foamy bubbles when used as a topcoat over wet polish.  Genius Russian bloggers were able to get spectacular results with this stuff ( seriously, watch the video because she makes it look suuuuper easy ), but my one attempt on a swatch stick was a total fail.  Flash forward to this year, when Sinful colors released their own version, and BOOM fluid nail art has really taken off. outdoor, bright sunlight I made a swatch stick with Dance Legend Spot It White when I first got it, painting directly over a wet black base using a technique like what was in that Russian video.  It ended up as a streaky white wash over the black base - no foamy look, no bubbles, dud.  After the Sinful polishes blew this trend up, folks came up with several ways to get the "cells" to form in wet polish, so I revisited DL Spot It White, and got the super cool results you see above. ...

One of my best girls was having some friends over this weekend for a traditional Maryland crab fest, which just called for a fun summertime crabs on the beach mani. outdoor, bright sunlight I've seen more than a few versions of "beach" nails, but the color arrangement and design I went with were mostly inspired by this fantastic tutorial from Elleandish .  I've used Toma Shimmer Gold to Shell Pink (an old and now dead thermal I've had since college) for the sand color, OPI I Believe in Manicures for the middle blue, and a light turquoise crème for the tips.  Unlike the tutorial, though, I did most of this with stamping, which I found to be WAY easier than a traditionally created gradient. upper right of the picture = a rectangle for stamping gradients! Several stamping plates have been released lately that feature a big plain rectangle that happens to be a fantastic way to mix colors into a gradient.  This is ZJoy-04, a really inexpensive plate that...

After my peel-off fiasco left me with 2 split nails, I immediately reached for Orly's Nail Rescue kit, which I've used on many occasions to solve these issues. Nail Rescue comes in a box that contains this small bottle of cyanoacrylate glue with an extremely convenient polish brush in the cap and a little jar of acrylic powder - yes, kids, you're going to make yourself a little patch of fake acrylic nail.  Spoiler alert:  this system is utterly genius, and WAY longer lasting than any tea bag patch. As a refresher, this was my problem.  Shown here is the split on my thumb, but in the rest of the pics, I'll be fixing my middle finger on my cinderella hand, which had a split just as bad, but much trickier to photograph without whackadoo contortions.  Fortunately, both of these splits hadn't caught on anything yet, and therefore weren't bent out of place.  In other words, this fix kit works best as soon as you notice a break problem, not after it's got...