101st Post!

I know that normal people celebrate 100th posts and stuff like that, but let's just say that I'm not normal, and that I totally missed that my last post was my hundredth.

Anyway, the last week has been pretty jam-packed with end of the summer, last minute hang outs and things to do. I've been out every night of the week, including Saturday when I made my most triumphant return to The Ex after fifteen long years:

 



 



The manicure you see in the picture is this one:

 

This was my first attempt at a "jelly sandwich", and I don't think it turned out quite as amazing as I wanted it to be. The contrast in colours and the choice of jelly polish weren't top notch, but I still enjoyed the look of it quite a bit.

I used 2 coats of Finger Paints Pop Rocks, followed by one coat of LA Girl Glitter Addict Explosion followed by one last coat of Pop Rocks.

Not my best piece of work, but it held up fine for my first post nubs manicure. :S

Any suggestions for what jelly sandwich combo I should be trying next?

Foiled!

I want to get this up before midnight, but I don't think that's going to happen. I really wanted to walk through the foil method for glitter polish removal, because honestly it's changed my lifelong opinion on glitter nail polish.

Here's what you'll need:

• Aluminum foil (maybe about 9" from the roll) cut into 10 pieces
• 10 small cotton balls
• Nail polish remover

So the basic idea of the foil method is to keep the acetone from evaporating before you have a chance to remove all the glitter. It also seems to soften up the glitter by soaking it in the nail polish remover. And I know 10 cotton balls might seem like a lot, but seriously if you consider how many you would go through normally trying to rub the glitter off (it took 8 when I removed Revlon Facets of Fuschia), 10 is a reasonable number. You probably don't even have to use that many, if you sort of pull the cotton balls in half - as long as it's enough to cover your nail.

So first, you soak the cotton ball in nail polish remover as you would normally, and place it on one of your nails. Then you take a piece of foil and wrap it tightly around your finger. I find it's easiest if you wrap it around lengthwise first, and then fold it over the edge of  your finger, making sure the foil is crimped tightly around your finger.

And then you just keep going for the rest of your fingers. I usually only do one hand at a time, since it's pretty much impossible to do the other hand while one hand is wrapped up in foil like this:

You can always reuse the foil, too, if you're concerned about waste. After you're all wrapped up, you just wait for 5-7 minutes or so, and then pull the foil pieces off one at a time while applying pressure and a slight twisting back and forth motion.

This is what it generally looked like after I pulled one off:

There's still a little bit left, but I chalked it up to my poor pressure application once I got to the end of the nail. But, NEVER FEAR, that last bit of glitter came off a lot easier than expected. I just re-used the cotton ball from inside the foil piece.

With equal pressure to all parts of the nail, you can get something that looks more like this:

Literally blows my mind every time. Here's a satisfying cotton ball picture:

Ugh...SO SATISFYING!

And so, by this point, after the most satisfying glitter removal ever, clean-up is as easy as crumpling all the foil into a little ball and tossing it into the garbage!

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I really wanted to see what the glitter jelly sandwich manicure would look like with a pink jelly polish. I totally planned to swatch it out tonight with Revlon Grapefruit Fizz, but I got home way too late from church, thanks to the ultra slippery roads. It "slushed" all day today, only to be followed by bone-chilling winds and a cover of snow. It was kind of ridiculous...I felt like I was driving on an ice rink. I actually missed the turn onto my street because I couldn't brake fast enough to make the turn safely, and I was only going 20km per hour!

Anyway, hopefully this is useful to somebody (anybody!) who reads this. :)

Supernova

So I saw this thing on a bunch of other blogs, and I thought I would try it out since it was so cute and it looked like candy. My excuse for changing my nails last night was that my previous manicure was not "professional" enough to wear to school today, but...

Obviously this was not any more professional than the last. But I really wanted to try it out. I put 1 coat of American Apparel - Supernova under 2 coats of Rimmel - French Rose from their French Manicure Pro collection. Supernova is a bunch of larger multicoloured (blue, orange, red, green, silver, and gold) hex glitter mixed in with smaller round silver, gold, magenta, and orange pieces, with even smaller green glitter in a clear base. I think it's close enough to Happy Birthday to fill that hole in my collection without me having to drop the $20+ on the actual Happy Birthday, and it was made especially better by the fact that I got this puppy for $3.

I like how the sheer pink polish mellows out the multi-coloured glitter and made it somewhat less inappropriate, haha. Initially I didn't like how the silver glitter turned white, but it's growing on me. The only think that hasn't sold me on this look is the fact that the sheer pink French Rose actually looks a little gray, which isn't the cute candy look I was going for -- if I ever do it again, I'll definitely try a pinker polish.

Here's a close-up of the index finger on my right hand:

I put a thinner layer of pink on this hand than I did on my left (pictured above) and I think I like having more of the glitter show through. I'm definitely digging how the gold glitter turns a pale yellow. I don't know why, but the little green pieces floating in the cloudy off-white top coat kind of reminded me of sour cream-n-onion chips...it was probably my hunger talking.

In other news, I came home to find that my mom tried to organize the miscellaneous polishes I had lying in a basket on top of my filing cabinet. I  never realized how many I actually had until I saw today that the miscellaneous polishes (not counting the ones in my rolling storage tower and the ones hiding in my desk drawer) filled 2 shoeboxes, neatly lined up! I quickly promised myself that I would not buy any more, but we all know that this is the emptiest of all promises, especially since the OPI Holland collection is coming out and I want I Have a Herring Problem and Wooden Shoe Like to Know in addition to Zoya Skylar so bad it's a bit ridiculous.

And so, that ends the hour of lazing around for me. Hopefully in 2 weeks I can come up with something a little more lab-appropriate. :P

2012

Helloooooo!

Due to an extreme need to procrastinate despite my impending doom on Wednesday and Thursday (and the rest of the semester, I guess), I have decided to make a post on my relatively inactive and most likely UNREAD nail blog.

But that's okay. We -- and by we, I mean the voices in my head and I -- have fun anyway.

Yesterday, I welcomed the New Year wth this blinged out combination. Glitter is not usually my cup of tea, since it takes about a billion years to remove it, but this year I decided to give that foil method a try. I figured now was a good a time as any, considering that I had about 6 layers of glitter and polish caked onto my nail -- 2 of Revlon Glitz & Glam, 1 of Nubar 2010, and 2 of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear In the Spotlight + base and top coats -- and I really wasn't about to spend the rest of my night picking it off in order to look somewhat less...TWELVE before school started up again. I really wish I'd taken pictures, but this will have to do:

In all seriousness, though, that foil method worked like you would not believe. All that glitter came off in one swipe. It kind of felt like my fingers were baking, though. I can't decide if that was due to the foil trapping all the heat from my fingers in, or if it was due to the acetone. I'll have to do some further experimentation.

Anyway, onto today's mani...

This was the first mani of 2012 and I kind of wanted to make it special but not too special as to require actual effort on my part. According to Grade 4-me, by the year 2012, we were supposed to have flying cars and computers which required only the power of our thoughts to type instead of tediously clacking away at a keyboard. Of course, Grade 4-me was also the President of the Snow Fort Building Club (I had my own office!) and the Running-and-Jumping-into-a-Brick-Wall-for-Funsies Club (which was rightfully shut down after a friend of mine broke the club record and then subsequently scraped off the entire side of her arm, no big). Grade 4-me was also not allowed to wear nail polish, which kind of explains Grade 7-me, and I guess University-me as well -- you know, like those kids who weren't allowed to eat sugar and then go bat shit crazy all of a sudden when they finally get a taste.

Luckily for us, something that has been invented prior to the year 2012 was magnetic nail polish:

Ta-daaaah! So impressed, I was. This is Nails Inc. Trafalgar Square, a magnetic polish that I bought at Sephora following my defeat of midterm season in November. This is my first magnetic polish, and I have to say that despite my concerns about how user-friendly magnetic polish may or may not be, I was pretty pleased by how easy it was to make my nails look this bad-ass. The outer cap comes off the bottle, leaving the smaller cap attached to the brush on the inside, which is - so I've heard - a huge advantage in terms of ease in magnetic polishes. The ring finger is a bit messed up because I put too thick a coat onto it and the magnet in the lid actually started to lift some of the polish off in droplets. Lesson learned.

Trafalgar Square has also, however, stolen the prestigious title of Most Expensive polish in my stash from Inglot 318, a light green $14 baby that I bought in Grade 8 (with the only $14 I had to my name, being 13 and all...) only to find that it was more yellow than green and totally did NOT go with my skin tone. Trafalgar Square was $18 + tax at Sephora and I really do not plan on topping that price tag anytime soon.

So that was a pretty long post. And there's probably nobody here to read it. But that's really okay, because I had a BLAST writing it.

-K