What What, in the Bu...bblegum-Scented Polish

This is my friend Angel:

This is what Angel looked like 3 weeks ago:

 This is what she looked like when I met her:

Besides the colour-changing hair, she also happens to have colour changing nails. Sometimes this happens while we're working 8 hour shifts together. It's a mystery. ;)

Anyway, there was this one time when she had a pretty awesome colour combination on and I really wanted to copy it. This want was pretty bad. But I didn't want to be matchy matchy. (Okay, maybe I sort of wanted to be matchy matchy. A little.) Also, I didn't want her to start thinking that she was any more awesome than she already thought she was. (Okay, she might actually be pretty awesome. Maybe.)

She said some random creep bus girl kept staring at her hand. So I definitely had to try it out.

The light blue polish is from a set of unnamed mini scented polishes from Old Navy. This one was bubblegum scented, which was a departure from all the berry-scented ones that I already own. The scent was light and sugary, not the scent that I would associate with bubblegum, but nice and light enough that it didn't bother me to be wearing it. On my ring finger, I did a single coat of American Apparel Mount Royal followed by a coat of Sally Hansen Crackle Overcoat in Snow Blast.

If you're interested, this is what Mount Royal looks like without the crackle:

The formula on both polishes was good. Mount Royal could have been a one-coater, and the bubblegum polish went on in two coats. There was a bit of a bald spot on my thumb, but nothing another thin coat couldn't fix.

So that's the manicure that I badly wanted to copy off my friend. I have to say that I don't really enjoy crackle as much as the general population does. What's with it, anyway? I have an obsession with nice, smooth, cleanly lacquered nails. Crackle is neither of those.

But...I enjoyed this combination anyway. And I hope you enjoyed it too!

Back To School!

It's happening. It's really happening.

This will be, as far as I can tell, my last first day of school. I think it's kind of ridiculous, to be honest. I feel like I'm five. I can't have possibly gone through 19 first days of school. That shit cray.

For weeks, the plan was to go all out for today and do rainbow leopard print to inject some colour into an otherwise miserable day. That changed when I realized that this might be (probably will be) my last first day of school and I won't ever have the chance to do another first day of school themed manicure! So the leopard print was scrapped. And I did this:

This definitely is not an original idea. The pencil was from cutepolish (who apparently got the idea from a magazine), and the lined paper has been there and done that all over the interwebs. Most of my notes are taken on my laptop these days, and I haven't used a non-mechanical pencil for years, but these made for some pretty cute nail art. I also hope you've noticed that I'm holding pens instead of a polish bottle. (Tee hee.)

I've seen versions of the lined paper mani with doodles all over them, but I liked the look of the plain lined paper so much that I left it alone.

The white base I used was Sally Hansen White On, the lines were Sally Hansen Coral Reef and Tip Toe (Old Navy) Bubblegum scented polish. The pencil top is Joe Fresh Caramel, the orange is  Wet 'n' Wild Sunny Side Up, the ridges are Joe Fresh Crush, the erase is Coral Reef again, and the silver part is Sally Hansen Celeb City.

I did end up doing one doodle, on my thumb, which is not visible in the above pictures:

So, to everybody going back to school, I wish you good luck and a wonderful year. And, to the future Class of 2013: let's kick some ass this year, huh?