Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Chunky Hearts Club Band: Valentine's Day Nails

I'm going to preface this post by saying, dude - this heart nail polish really sucked to work with!

But, uh... that said... Check out my new Valentine's Day inspired nail polish look - chunky hearts with pink polka dots!

This started out as a great idea. I found this Love & Beauty nail polish sometime within the last 6 months or so - probably while I was living in Portland - and thought to myself, "Oh snap that'll be good to have." Especially for $2.80. Why the hell not?



Fast forward to now and I'm actually trying to use the freaking polish for the first time. As you can see, it's a clear base with pink, heart-shaped confetti pieces in it. Wonderful in theory, but the creators neglected to consider the weight or texture of either of those two components. The base is super, super thin and slippery as shit, and it just runs right off the brush as soon as I raise it out of the bottle. The base is so thin that the heart confetti doesn't stand a chance - trying to get any of the confetti to stay on the brush as I raised it out of the bottle was also near impossible. Oy! So, that said, I wasn't thrilled with how this look came out. BUT let's go over how I did it anyway, #SHALLWE?

Grab some t'ings that look like this:


If you have a heart confetti polish, I hope it's better than mine! I think Revlon just came out with some new cool looking confetti polishes with hearts and stars... but maybe I imagined that.

In addition to nightmare heart polish I'm using Love & Beauty's weird off-white, Jasmine-scented, unnamed polish and a little bit of Milani's Tip Toe Pink. I'm also using my dotting tool for the polka dots.

Step 1: Paint all your nails two coats of white/off-white:


Step 2: With a polish that didn't suck, you'd probably do something totally normal here, like use the polish brush to apply a few coats of your heart confetti polish. Since my heart confetti refused to stay on the brush due to its weight and its base's slippery texture, I had to get a little more... involved. To get the hearts onto my nails, I sort of fished out some of the heart confetti with the polish brush, plucked them off the brush with a toothpick and then applied them to my nails using the toothpick. But the base was so slippery and "flowy" that it still ended up leaving a big dollop of base coat around each of the hearts.



Not the most uncool thing that could have happened. But not the coolest either. Definitely not the coolest.

Step 3: I wasn't stoked about how the hearts looked by themselves on the nails, so I used a dotting tool to add some pink dots around the hearts:


When everything is quite dry - like, really really dry - apply a top coat to the whole thing to make it all less bumpy. I wasn't patient enough for that ;)


There are some things I'd do differently if I were to try this again:

- Pluck out my heart confetti pieces in advance and do whatever needed to be done to get that base polish totally off of them! That stuff was just no help!

- Apply the dry heart confetti right after I finished painting on my white base coat, so the hearts would better adhere to the wet base polish.

- I'd have taken a pic of the nails after I used top coat! DOH!

Well I just checked my calendar and it's still not Valentine's Day yet so I still have more Valentine's Day nail polish looks to show you! Stay tuned.... or stay nail nude. Whichever.

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