Ombre Blue Nails

Whewww this week went by fast! Which is odd because I thought it was Friday on Wednesday. Then I thought it was Friday again for most of the day yesterday. Now, I know... for sure, I think, that today is Friday. Right?? Right. And that means it's nails day! Whooop.

This was a mani idea that spontaneously popped into my head earlier this week, and I'm so pleased that it came out as well as I'd envisioned it. MAYBE EVEN BETTER. Behold:

I have a tonnn of blue nail polishes, in such a wide variety of shades. Might as well use a couple of them at once, right?

The polishes I selected were Navy from Forever21's Love & Beauty line and Coastal Surf by Revlon, which is a color that Dave got me for Christmas.

I really like this Navy polish, you might have noticed. I use it pretty often - including last week! It's shimmer free and super shiny, though it does take 2-3 coats for opacity.

Coastal Surf is an awesome polish, too. It's really opaque, and the brush is wide and flat - my faaaaav.

This was the classic sponged-on ombre technique, which I've featured before (here, here, and here). There was a little preview on my Instagram yesterday, to show you how the sponge looked:

Aaaand here are how my crazy fingers looked after I sponged that shit on:

After that mess, you can imagine that it took me SO long to clean my nails up to the point that you see in these pictures. SO LONG. Meticulously, with two different nail art brushes dipped gingerly into acetone. Dip, clean, repeat. And it still isn't perfect! Oy!!

What are you rocking on your nails today?

Have you done the ombre method on your nails before? It's SEW EASY. DEW IT.

Anyone doing anything fancy this weekend? (I happen to actually be doing something fancy on Sunday - tell you about it later!)

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Winter Bling Nails

My apologies for the complete cliff-hanger with our Christmas road trip to Banff. It's taking me much longer to write Part II than I'd anticipated, and editing all of the pictures is also a little more time consuming than I'd factored in. The post is almost complete and will hopefully be up in the next couple of days. And, as I'd fore-warned, there is going to be a Part III as well! Yikes.

In the meantime I wanted to quickly post this new nail polish blog because I rather fancied this look and it actually required some sincere patience on my part to complete... So here is some Winter Bling for your nails to make you feel fucking awesome!

.  winter bling nails!  .

Here's what I used... As you can see, both of these polishes are from the Forever21 Love & Beauty line, which are super cheap polishes - usually either $2.80 or $3.80. I have a ton of polishes from this line, as you can imagine. 

.  crystal silver  .

.  navy  .

Crystal Silver is really cool and I'm very glad I bought it. It's got a clear base with fine silver glitter and chunky hexagonal silver glitter and it looks cool on top of... everything so far. "Navy" is literally the name of the blue polish and although I don't have very high hopes that you'll be able to find this exact same navy blue polish from Forever21, I'm going to rave about it to you right now anyway. It's an AWESOME color!! It's such a pretty navy blue, with a slight hint of "royal" blue to it. It's so bright and vibrant. Probably what I like moooost about it though is that there's no glitter or shimmer in it at all. It's kind of tricky to find polishes that don't have any shimmer whatsoever, but this one is totally devoid of any. Very regal looking. #SEWPERCLASSY

Here's what I did with all this regalness:

1. Paint every nail 2 coats of Navy.

2. Cover thumbnails with one coat of Crystal Silver.

3. Paint the tips of your pointer, middle and ring fingers with Crystal Silver - kind of like a French manicure except way more boss.

4. Use every ounce of patience that you have to carefully pluck out chunky hexagonal glitter pieces from the Crystal Silver polish, place them gingerly on your pinky nail and tap them down to push them solidly into place... one... by.... one. Here are a couple of progress pictures from while I was doing this step:

1/3 done with one nail!

.  sorry for zee blurriness, i must have been going cross-eyed from all the blinging .

2/3 done with one nail!

When you're done you feel like you're just one bling short of having one of those Beyonce robot hands from the Single Ladies music video. And who doesn't want that?! #robothandsgetshitdone

Now... put your hands UP!

... Get it?